Nigel Farage has promised not to elevate any Reform donors to the House of Lords if his party wins the next general election.

The Reform UK leader said on Wednesday that “not a single” donor will be offered a peerage, insisting that their motive for donating to the party was because they believed “Britain is broken”.

Well, that saves some money then…..

What will happen – if winning, of course – is a rather large creation of working peers. So, that’s Gawain in I guess. I might be able to blag a drink on the terrace out of him when that happens. As to the rest, as we were. No point in mortgaging the house if the gong doesn’t follow, right?

The post Phew first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Living in London means that my supplier is Thames Water, which makes a profit out of pollution. I decided that if the government wouldn’t act, I could at least do my part and not pay for this travesty.

The case for not paying these outrageous charges is clear. The water companies are not fulfilling their duties and instead they are discharging raw sewage into our waterways and lives. Beyond that, they have brought in hosepipe bans, despite last winter being one of the wettest on record, because they haven’t built enough reservoirs to store water for use in the summer.

You’re actually in the House of Lords. Therefore you know that some – some – sewage in the rivers is allowable under the terms of the licences. Also, that the reason reservoirs aren’t bing built is that the planning system denies the ability to build reservoirs.

So the bint is complaining about the system not the company, yet is protesting the company not the system.

Sigh.

The post It’s your fault, silly bint first appeared on Tim Worstall.

One of Malta’s richest men has been found not guilty of involvement in the murder of the anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

OK. A jury verdict is a jury verdict.

Nearly nine years after Caruana Galizia’s death in a car bombing in October 2017, a jury of six women and three men found Yorgen Fenech, 44, not guilty of both counts with which he had been charged: complicity in the voluntary homicide of Caruana Galizia, and association with the intention of committing a crime.

Delivered at 7.30pm, the verdict was decisive. To gasps from the gallery and cheers from Fenech’s relatives, the forewoman announced jurors had voted to dismiss both counts by an eight-to-one majority.

The post Really? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

This helps explain why French people have great expectations of the state and accept some of the highest levels of taxation, income redistribution and public spending as a proportion of economic output of any major economy. It also helps explain why France’s debt-to-GDP ratio of 118% is among the highest and fastest rising in Europe.

If they’re all paying high taxes then why should the debt be large? Unless the insistence is that no amount of taxation will ever be enough for the spending desires of the politiians and therefore large government simply will mean large debt?

The post Not sure these go together first appeared on Tim Worstall.

For Kym Dunbar, a freelance writer and editor based in Australia, AI cleanup now accounts for about 60% of her workload, as writing work like blogs and website copy have dwindled. As a result, Dunbar said her monthly earnings from writing original content have fallen to roughly a third of what she made during the pandemic.

Dunbar stumbled into cleanup work in 2024, when a client asked her to revise an AI-generated article. She quickly learned to spot recurring problems, from repetitive language and awkward paragraph structures to a lack of emotional nuance. Since then, she has worked on about 40 AI-generated nonfiction books, longform articles and technical papers.

“There’s a lot less good projects available for writers and editors these days,” Dunbar said.

Whether you get would up by less and fewer is largely a matter of choice these days. But it’s not a huge advertisement for a freelance editor that, is it?

The post Umm first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Firstly, the Bank of England could be told to stop its quantitative tightening programme, which is deliberately designed to fuel this crisis.

Secondly, the government could declare what it already says exists, and call the current economic situation a cost-of-living crisis, and so intervene in Bank of England policy, ordering it to cut rather than increase interest rates at this point in time.

Thirdly, the government could, if it wished, reduce the number of bonds it sells into financial markets when it appears they do not want to buy them. It could do this by cancelling current bond auctions and funding itself through the Bank of England instead. Rationing the supply of new bonds would immediately affect their price and send shockwaves through the market.

You just wait and see what gilts rates rise to if you go for full on monetisation of the deficit, Matey. For a major determinant of the price/yield on gilts is expectations of future inflation……

The post Snigger first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The chequebooks of the rich and powerful are already circling the next election. The question for Labour is, are we prepared to pay the price if we refuse to stop them?

Events are moving not necessarily to my advantage. Change the law to stop it!

About what you’d expect from Stella Creasy, obviously.

Labour is yet to commit to this because some are uneasy that capping individual donations could lead to calls to cap collective donations from membership organisations and trade unions. This is not the first time this fear has led to inaction.
…
Critically NC120 explicitly exempts trade unions from the cap

Yep, I’m going to wholly rig the system in my favour. About what we’d expect from Stella Creasy.

The post Quick, quick, change the law! first appeared on Tim Worstall.

However, senior figures in the party and Jewish organisations have claimed the swell in membership is an example of “entryism” – the tactic of infiltrating an existing party with the goal of influencing it from within.

As Your Party imploded given the total inability of the British left to ever do anything they fled to the Greens. Which is duffering the same problem.

Those hard left groupuscules gain the support of those in hard left groupuscules and pretty much no one else. It’s the Reform/Restore problem of how far to the knuckle dragging right does anyone go? Because you do get to stage where the knuckle draggers turn off more than the support they themselves bring. Throw out all the tinted gains as much support – and as much revulsion – as nationalise everything and have the Comissars tell everyone what to do.

Jus’ the way it works.

The post Obviously first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Are you tired? Feeling flat and irritable? Finding it difficult to concentrate? Maybe you’re experiencing the seemingly ubiquitous symptoms of modern life. Or, if you’re a man, you may have been told by countless uncredentialed online influencers that you’re probably suffering from “low T”.

For decades, testosterone has been marketed to men as a means to maximise virility. But in recent years, social media has fuelled the “T-maxxing” trend, in which men are encouraged to maximise their testosterone levels through either natural or artificial means.

Low testosterone is being blamed in the rightwing manosphere for a crisis of masculinity; global search interest in the term is up 60% from last year.

You know, manipulation of hormone levels is bad, very bad….

The post Wait ’till she finds out about HRT first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Disabled people are being blocked from travelling abroad by NHS care boards and local councils that refuse to let them use their care funding outside the UK, the Guardian has learned.

Campaigners warn of a “postcode lottery” in England where the right of a disabled person to travel overseas depends on where they live or the whim of local officials – even when there is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

Disabled care users report having to abandon travel plans at the last minute, or go for years without a break, when authorities refuse to pay for their care abroad, even though they have agreed to meet all the travel expenses.

News to me that we do pay for people to go on their hols.

Lucy Robinson, 38, told the Guardian she had been prevented from attending international work events and going on a holiday because health officials in Oxfordshire had refused to allow her to use her care package abroad.

Robinson, who is quadriplegic and has a team of 24-hour personal assistants,

The claim is, apparently, that the NHS should pay for the complete team to go on such trips.

Campaigners have emphasised this is not about “holidays on the NHS”. There is no extra cost for the health service or local authorities, which are already paying for the care. In almost all cases, the care recipient is expected to pay for their assistant’s expenses and arrange their insurance.

Hmm. Dunno to be honest – seems like quite a big ask.

The post Eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Raygun – real name Dr Rachael Gunn, author of the PhD thesis Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl’s Experience of B-boying

Yes, that is the bird from the Olympics.

The post What’s wrong with academia first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The deeply contented edifice that is the Financial Times, populated by teams of people who have done particularly well from maintaining the status quo of the last 45 years, does need to feel that it is under threat, because the reality is that the winds of change are blowing, and they are heading its way.

Spud pitched a piece to the FT which declined. They are therefore neoliberal – until he’s at war with Eastasia at least.

The post To explain first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The row centres on comments by Orla Minihane, Restore’s spokesman on the safety of women and girls, who argued that all British girls deserved protection against abuse, regardless of their families’ heritage.

At an event held by Restore’s Gateshead branch, she said: “We’ve got to protect our girls, but we have to remember that there are Indian, Asian girls, Pakistani girls, Bangladeshi girls, Somalian girls, who were born here, who are suffering this fate every day. And we have got to protect them also.”

The comments prompted a backlash from hard-line figures linked to Restore on social media, who argued that “white native girls are our priority” and “our own come first”. And they were furious when other senior figures backed Ms Minihane.

I recall, back in 2008, that at Ukip anyone who’d ever been BNP, NF or any of the rest of them was not allowed to join Ukip. On the basis that this sort would turn up if they were allowed. Restore, by trying to be that one step further out from Reform is facing exactly the same problem.

The point is not that such should not have parliamentary representation, or have a political representative. Bill Stone’s comment about cunts is true. It’s also not about whatever we might, or you or I might, think about the matter itself. Rather, there are views which are outside the Overton Window. Yes, it’s possible to shift that window, as has been done – most notably about the EU – and that takes time. It may even be a good idea to shift that window – as with the EU. But at any particular time there are ideas that are simply outside it. Electoral politics means that you cannot win if you are too wildly outside it. You lose too many toward the centre for however may you pick up at the extreme.

Please do note, this isn’t about the specific of this policy or complaint. Nor is it about whether Overton should or can be shifted. It’s that any party looking for electoral success has to cut off – as Restore is going here – the tail end of ideas. This is true of any set of ideas too.

It won’t be true if we ever move to a PR electoral system but it is true of a FPTP one.

The post The wisdom of Nigel first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Ministers are considering a shake-up of the government’s social mobility watchdog that could range from giving it more teeth to abolishing it outright.

The move comes amid concerns that the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) – originally conceived under Gordon Brown’s government in 2010 – has become ineffective.

Class in Britain – one’s social level perhaps – has never actually been about economics. Not that government really has switches they can flip about economics and incomes of individials anyway. But the idea that they have control of how other people at large regard and determine the class of those they view is truly absurd.

Our Ange is fairly rich and very powerful – as is Ms. Haigh – but neither are going to be described as class acts. That’s just the way this country runs. So trying to determine it centrally ……..

The post All more than a bit odd first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The Dutch tech company ASML is Europe’s most valuable company, thanks to its production of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. These underlie the most advanced chip-making in the world, and as such are one of few possible choke-points on the entire AI industry. ASML has mastered the technology and intricate supply chain to make the $400m per unit machines needed to etch patterns on to silicon, where light is focused to a 13.5 nanometre wavelength (about 1/10,000th of the width of a human hair). Without its machines, there are no chips; without the chips, there are no more datacentres. That means everything from Taiwanese chip-maker TSMC’s $265bn investment in future fabrication facilities (known as “fabs”), to the $7tn-worth of datacentres that the industry is expected to build globally (though primarily in the US) by 2030. Without more datacentres using these current and next-generation chips, AI’s progression along an exponential growth (and risk) curve would come to a halt.

So the EU bans the export of ASML machines, the EU therefore controls AI development and isn’t that lovely?

Living in Paris is affecting Laddie’s brains. He’s starting to think like an enarque.

The post Weird, weird, ideas first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Take a house as an example. You can increase a home’s value by taking out a bigger mortgage, and on paper your financial wealth has grown. But the house is the same house. No new bedrooms, no new kitchen, and no new real wealth has been created by increasing its price. What has changed is the claim on it, and the power that claim represents.

Why does taking out a mortgage on a house change the price of the house?

Is this just Spud being Spud?

This matters. Partly that is because private wealth cannot exist without public wealth. The roads, schools, hospitals and legal systems that make economic activity possible are public wealth, but poverty prevents some people from even having access to them.

Again, eh? Someone’s too poor to be able to walk down the road? Whut?

The post Eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Criminals deemed a danger to society will be freed from jail under Andy Burnham’s early release plans, MPs and former justice secretaries have warned.

Opponents said Mr Burnham’s plans to create more prison space by ending a category of indefinite sentences could lead to “high-risk” offenders returning to the streets.

Folk get put in chokey for what they have done, not for what they might do.

Cunts.

The post Fuck off, you vile, ghastly, shits first appeared on Tim Worstall.

A recruitment executive who was allowed to buy back the assets of his bust company in instalments, despite it accumulating almost £3m of debt, has placed his new business into liquidation after falling behind with promised payments to the administrator.

The news is the latest event to raise questions about the practice of “phoenixism”, accounting’s controversial art of liquidating companies to allow directors to return with a new entity, free of debts.

The tactic, which is legal, is often justified by supporters who argue it can save jobs and help secure some returns for creditors – although HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) estimates it costs the UK taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

If a company goes bust it doesn’t have the money to pay the taxman. So allowing someone to buy the company increases, not reduces, the amount available to pay the taxman.

That a phoenix then goes bust again just shows that it wasn’t a good business in the first place – that’s why it went bust. But this issue of HMRC losing out. By definition the pheonix offer must be the best available and also better than the returns from liquidation. Therefore it – by definition – increases payment to HMRC, not reduces.

Yes, I know what Jim is going to say. The above is still true.

The post Abject nonsense first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Dame Jasvinder warned some perpetrators hid behind accusations of racism.

She said: “They (perpetrators) will try and put you on the back foot. ‘This is our culture. This is our religion. You’re being racist’ or whatever, to put you on the back foot, to make you look the other way.

“And I do feel that it still does exist in terms of professionals having the confidence (to report such safeguarding concerns). Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable.”

And, you know, which culture?

The Home Office said forced marriage was “not a problem specific to one country, religion or culture; there is no archetypal victim or perpetrator, and no two cases are the same”.

And isn’t that a nice piece of blindness?

The post They’re not saying, are they? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The yes campaign had argued that joining the EU could offer greater security amid war in Ukraine and the Middle East, and given the US president’s unpredictable attitude towards the Arctic.

But the no campaigners’ warnings that EU membership would threaten the country’s sovereignty and fishing waters turned the vote in their favour.

So yes was arguing some pie in the sky and no was stating truths. Isn’t it joyous to find a small corner of politics where truth won out for a change?

The post Interesting positions first appeared on Tim Worstall.