spyhistorian.bsky.social
Historian. Spies, signals intelligence, Second World War. Social and Cultural history. History of humour. Insults = 🚫
2,381 posts
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Getting Started
Active Commenter
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Lads... this is not good. Just pay actual people to do an actual job properly.
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It is very well written. Sadly, the argument is wrong. While we might lament the subordination of Wales in the attention paid by central government, it is better to have a minister in cabinet than not.
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I guess they are "new" if you've only read work published in the last decade
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Real men "debate" issues by insinuating one is unhinged (true, of course) and the other might be a paedophile?
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Is that a food or place?
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Fortunately, I'm not yet 40 and can retrain. I'll miss teaching and writing but I'm sure my services will be appreciated somewhere. I feel bad for those who are approaching retirement and haven't got another 27 years.
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Didn't we already know that?
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We're toast. It was a good career while it lasted.
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Oh God, what now?!
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Everything! I'm there for a week in mid-July and intend to put on a stone in weight.
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I'm staying in the Museum district. I look forward to singlehandedly improving US GDP by eating and drinking until I burst.
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The founders constructed a system where the only people who could vote were wealthy white men, individuals likely to be educated, speak multiple languages and educated in the classics. Men like them.
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Maybe it is because your ideas are without evidence?
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And yet ctime rates have fallen as immigration has accelerated. It's almost as if racists are dumb...
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Well, quite. Senior staff salaries would cover redundancies across entire departments. They also aren't core, despite the fact that VC offices regularly number 25+. I think you could set a term with double normal Reader salary, only have 5-7 of them, and you'd get no less an outcome.
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Just looking at that, doesn't it mean that there were no non-white people in Britain before what, 1990? Big if true.
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Just a thought, but perhaps some of the folk at Buckingham. Andrew Boyd used to post a lot on the "other place", he is an SWW Naval Intel expert.
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But heaven help the political party that raises retirement from 67 to 72. It has to be done but will destroy the party. A bit like Peel's abolition of the Corn Laws (something President Trump may wish to study).
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Either that or face up to hard choices and our politicians having the guts to tell the truth. Ultimately, I think we will have to do B. In 1950 life expectancy was 67. Pension age was 60 for women and 65 for men. Today it is 67 and a life expectancy of 78 and 82.
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Not just Birmingham, councils of every party are in deep trouble because we starved them of cash. Brum also got into hot water with a discrimination case - which rather shows the point of EDI training and regs which Farage and Blue Labour want to strip away.
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Well this is it. If we want quality public services we can:
A. Pay more in taxes in which case you don't need as many immigrants.
B. Raise the age of retirement by 5-10 years.
C. Import labour and economic activity that brings.
I pick C.
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Yes, lots of people are willing to buy easy answers to difficult when times are tough. It is the human condition. What will be interesting to see is whether they still support Reform when their Reform council goes into special measures because it turns out easy solutions don't work.
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The issue you raise is about austerity and a lack of investment, planning laws that are overly restrictive, and so on.
Immigrants have actually kept the systems going. If you want to fix them, you need to understand the problem and not just blame immigrants because it is easier than facing reality.
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Statistically speaking, first generation immigrants are less indolent in people born here.
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So does every major party, including the Tories. So what?
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Migrants are the very people propping up these public services.
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This is true of all the parties, less so Labour as trade unions support some MPs to get elected, which costs tens of thousands of personal money and lost work hours. You won't get an Angela Rayner or Jess Phillips in Reform.
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His policies have failed at every turn when adopted.
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Farage is a privately educated commodity trader and spent years in the European parlaiment. Tice is a privately educated multi-millionaire.
We also did what Farage wanted, left the EU and introduced a points-based immigration system and immigration went through the roof.
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The right are focusing on this case because they want to make her a political victim, the actual conversation we should be having is what is prison for and does imprisoning huge numbers of people reduce crime?
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Yes, of course. It's how a number have happened. But in this case she absolutely did what she admitted to and then tried to cover it up.
Personally, I don't think she should be in prison. But because I think we counter-productively overuse prison in general, not because the sentencing is wrong.
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Reform are the establishment pushing a the same diet of easy answers to complex problems.
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Weirdly, daft admin roles that probably don't need to exist or at least should get maybe 10 hours per semester get very generous allocations.
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Ah, the magic workload models! You keep on taking on more work, but your hours go down on the model. A good fiddle is to reduce prep-time to less than it takes to read through a lecture, nevermind actually update materials.
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The public have been fed a diet of economically illiterate blather for decades by politicians who want to create a scapegoat for socio-economic ills to avoid addressing the actual issue: we want first-class services for bargain basement prices.
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The reason she was given this sentence is clearly spelled out by the sentencing judge.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...
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If she had been manipulated or pressured into pleading guilty to something she had not done or if the penalty was grossly disproportionate to the crime. She did it and her sentence, as the court of appeal pointed out, is not excessive according to the sentencing guidelines.
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There is also an extremely stringent system in place called Tier 4. My PhD student, paying a fortune to be here, has to attend pointless meeting every two weeks to satisfy it.
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International students pat many times more into the system than they take out. Reducing their numbers is simply bad economics and counting them in immigration numbers is bad statistics.
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It isn't a miscarriage of justice. She pleaded guilty to a crime with a maximum sentence of 7 years. She got less than 3 and will only spend 40% of her 31 months in prison. So she will spend just over a year inside. That for encouraging rioters to burn refugees alive. If you can't do the time, etc.
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Farage and Reform pushed the anti-immigration agenda and called for fewer international students. This is as much on them.
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Sarah-Louise Miller (if she has a post), Dan Ellin, Andy Saunders, on the RAF side. Richard Aldrich, Mike Goodman, John Ferris, Rory Cormac, Chris Moran, Dan Lomas. There are loads of others but I'm drawing a blank.