Recent posts

#1

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 05:39:12 PM

They didn't force the embassy staff to go? 

#2

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by Jacob - Today at 05:31:57 PM

Any of you planning on the Melania Trump documentary?

On Monday, US President Donald Trump shared multiple photos from a VIP-filled screening of his wife's movie Melania, declaring the feature-length documentary is "a MUST WATCH" and claiming tickets are "selling out, FAST!".

While that might be true in certain areas, the UK response to director Brett Ratner's affectionate cinematic tribute to the First Lady has been distinctly lukewarm. Cinema chain Vue premiered Melania at its flagship Islington location in London at 3.10pm on Friday, attracting just a single ticket buyer.

The subsequent 6pm showing performed marginally better, drawing two attendees.

...

Amazon MGM Studios reportedly invested $40 million (£29m) for the polished documentary, accompanied by a marketing budget of approximately $35million (£25m).

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/melania-trump-humiliated-just-one-36630453

For my part, I think I'll give it a miss.

#3

Off the Record / Re: ICE misconduct megathread ...

Last post by Oexmelin - Today at 05:19:08 PM

It would go along with the re-monarchization of our political culture.

#4

Off the Record / Re: ICE misconduct megathread ...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 04:12:02 PM

Yeah, AI is a worry (in Hungary, Fidesz is making heavy use of it already, although only in mocking videos I don't think they expect even their followers to truly believe authentic), but hopefully it will ultimately swing the pendulum back in the sense that it will make people seek out trustworthy, larger organisations (newspapers and such) as sources of news rather than relying on ChadAlpha69 on Twitter for their news updates.

Maybe - I think there'll be a reaction against it to some extent. But I also worry the opposite is happening and worry that we're heading into a more oral, post-literate world of rumour and anecdote and re-enchantment and "seems like".

#5

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 04:09:32 PM

I have noticed that often what the Guardian call an "expert" is just a person committed enough to an idea or course of action to join/form a lobbying group for it.

And also a fair bit of bias in how they are covered. The way the Guardian frames someone speaking from a right wing think tank or pressure group v a left wing is very blatant

Incidentally this always rminds me of law school because my equity lecturer used to rage against the 2006 Charities Act In part because he was an elderly reactionary Cambridge don (he was so old he'd been a tutor for John Cleese ), but his argument was largely because it broadened the definition of a "charitable purpose" that charities could be set up to advance. I think it has basically become a bit of a middle-class graduate make-work scheme (and route into politics). So he moaned a lot about I think a homelessness charity that was basically raising lots of money on its reputation for helping the homelessness but was spending most of that money on public policy - so coming up with and lobbying for policy ideas on how to address homelessness.

I get the argument for why that might be more effective on a large scale (I'm not sure it actually has been though in many areas of policy) - but his point was it basically totally elided the world of charities v the world of pressure groups which used to be separate (eg Oxfam was a charity while Amnesty was a pressure group).

#6

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by Baron von Schtinkenbutt - Today at 04:04:21 PM

66 counts all commissioned submarines in the Russian Navy.  9 are "special purpose", a mix of testbeds and small, short-ranged noncombat boats.  Further, at least a dozen are currently in varying states of inactivity.  All in, they have 40-45 combat-effective boats (if public statuses are to be believed), with about an even three-way split between boomers, nuke boats, and diesel boats.

#7

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 04:02:01 PM

Just in time for the increase in defence spending from 2.4% to 3.5% by 2035. Really just precautionary rearmament we can take a decade to do, given how still and peaceful everything is

#8

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Tamas - Today at 04:00:05 PM

I have noticed that often what the Guardian call an "expert" is just a person committed enough to an idea or course of action to join/form a lobbying group for it.


Also I have read that one of the handful useful things the government has embarked upon, namely reforming regulation on rented properties, lifting it to about 1960s levels of civilisation, well they have delayed making the new rules mandatory until 2035 which is as good as cancelling them.

[Government proposals to overhaul England's planning system fail to mention women or girls and ignore official recommendations to keep women safe made after the death of Sarah Everard, experts have told the Guardian.]

#9

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 03:50:02 PM

I thought this story was interesting - and I hope the government hold the line:

England planning proposals fail to mention safety of women and girls, say critics
Draft proposals likely to 'embed risk and inequality', campaigners and urban planners say
Alexandra Topping Political correspondent
Wed 28 Jan 2026 13.00 GMT

Government proposals to overhaul England's planning system fail to mention women or girls and ignore official recommendations to keep women safe made after the death of Sarah Everard, experts have told the Guardian.

Draft planning proposals – published two days before the government's strategy to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) – are likely to "embed risk and inequality" despite the strategy's insistence that "design and planning are critical tools" in keeping women safe, MPs campaigners and urban planners have said.

The VAWG strategy and part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry, commissioned after the murder of Everard – both published in the same month as the planning proposals – call for women's safety to be embedded into the planning of public spaces.

But the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which sets out the government's intent to massively increase housebuilding, has "no references whatsoever to women, girls, gendered safety, or violence against women in the built environment", the Liberal Democrat MPs Anna Sabine and Gideon Amos said.

In a letter to the housing minister Matthew Pennycook and the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, as first reported in the Planner, they wrote: "Planning policy is one of the most powerful structural tools the state has to prevent harm before it occurs. If the NPPF is silent on gendered safety, we embed risk and inequality into the fabric of every new development."

When contacted by the Guardian about the letter, a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) spokesperson said: "The NPPF is a planning document. It sets out guidelines for housebuilding and planning in England. The VAWG strategy is about protecting women and girls from violence and misogyny."

They said it was "unclear as to why anyone would expect the two things to be combined" and therefore it was difficult to respond to the criticism. It is understood the ministers have not yet formally responded.

It was, said Sabine, an "incredibly arrogant" response. "If you don't understand how women's safety ties in with how we design new spaces, you shouldn't be working at MHCLG," she said.

Susannah Walker, a gender planning consultant who noticed the omission, said the proposals ignored the VAWG strategy and the second part of the report by Dame Elish Angiolini, commissioned after the murder of Everard four years ago. Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021 after being abducted off a London street while walking home.

Angiolini said promises of sweeping changes to make women safer as they walk the streets had been hampered by a "paralysis", and officers tasked with "designing out" crime, which exist in every police force, were sometimes ignored and had not all "been tasked with focusing on preventing violence against women and girls".

The VAWG strategy states that: "Women and girls must both feel safe and be safe in every aspect of public life [...] Well-lit streets, accessible transport, and thoughtful urban design can deter violence, reduce opportunities for harm, and send a clear message that public spaces belong to everyone."

Phillips has long-argued that in order to achieve the government's stated ambition of halving VAWG in a decade, all government departments had to play a part.

If councils were not specifically instructed to consider women and girls' safety, they would not do so, said Walker. "Councils are underfunded, so if it doesn't go in the NPPF, then it just gets left out because it's not mandatory," she said. "Coming after two high-level government reports which both talk about designing space to keep women safe, this is the most extraordinary omission."

Sabine told the Guardian she did not doubt Phillips's commitment to get cross-departmental buy-in on ending violence against women and girls, and asked her to "march into" Pennycook's office to change the draft framework.

"We have a world that's largely designed by and for men," she said. "But if you take into account women and girls' safety, you can make very practical decisions that will really benefit women and girls' lives."

Thought it showed a few things that I think are problems in British politics and why everything is quite sclerotic. First was just the ease of going from campaign to MP to an article in the Guardian (and it is always the Guardian citing "experts" ).

Another is that it reminds me of a paper done by a think tank recently that Rory Stewart picked up on. It basically said that the problem with the British state is "everythingism". They basically argued that basically every policy the government pursues is a means of promoting every national objective/addressing every issue at the same time (also often framed around being holistic or joined up or engaging all stakeholders). So housing policy is not about housing but also biodiersity net gain and nitrogen imbalances in rivers and violence against women and girls etc.

Rory Stewart's example was that he was Secretary of State for International Development during the Syrian refugee crisis - obviously a very big issue for his department. He went to meetings at the MoD, Intelligence Services, FCO and basically discovered that all of the relevant DfID team were dialling in from East Kilbride in Clydeside. He said this is a really important issue and there'd be side meetings and he needed civil service support in London. He was told by the Permanent Secretary that the relevant team were based in East Kilbride which was a core part of DfID's role in helping regeneration projects there. So he agreed but asked if they could come to London for these weekly all department Syria meetings - which was agreed. He gets to the next meeting and his team are dialling in again. He says the Permanent Secretary told him that they'd have to fly for it to be a one day trip and that would go against DfID's role in achieving net zero. Stewart found it incredibly frustrating but used it as an example of this every policy has to address every issue at once (I'd add from my devolution perspective that it's a classic civil service approach to devolution and regeneration as well: put part of what's now the Foreign Office in East Kilbride, or the Treasury in Darlington - because they'll never challenge London in the way that, say, Glasgow or Newcastle might).

The other thing is the alarming number of people in public life who don't seem to understand that the solution to council underfunding is not to just keep on adding new mandatory things that it needs to consider. That will just increase the pressure on already underfunded councils to review more impact assessments and consultants' reports (and give them more reasons to reject planning proposals). Developments need to deliver x number of houses (y% of which should be affordable), should also have commercial space delivering z thousand jobs, produce a biodiversity net game, have a neutral impact on nutrients in nearby ground and water, protect any possible species nearby, have new public amenities, "design out" crime, help us meet our statutory duty to reach net zero by 2050, preserve local heritage assets etc - but you've still only got one underpaid planning officer to assess all of this (and introduced about ten different bases which NIMBYs could challenge in the courts).

I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea on its own terms - but on top of everything else involved in planning and with no extra resources for councils to actually do it I don't think it's helpful.

#10

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 03:46:24 PM

The Russian Navy has 66 submarines?

They have a lot of boats that are underwater, not sure I'd call them all submarines though.

Seaforth says they had 56 as of 2023, doubt they added 10 since then. 
Of the 56, 10 of them were old style Soviet era Kilo diesel boats