Starmer & winter fuel: break open more popcorn

Somewhat to my surprise, there's to be a pre-Party Conference set-piece in Parliament - tomorrow - on the winter fuel allowance thing.  The Deputy Speaker who allowed it obviously has a sense of humour - the Speaker's office evidently didn't enjoy being bamboozled and bullied last year over the Gaza vote, eh? 

And with Kier 'Bang'em Up' Starmer digging in at the weekend, and a hapless[1] junior minister being disowned by No.10 this morning, it's looking set to be another virility test.  

Of course, there are loads of simple ways Starmer/Reeves could sugar the pill a bit, but everything seems set fair for an outright 3-line whip / loyalty test on the blunt and brutal means-testing they've announced[2].  The most they've done so far is very pointedly to re-confirm the triple lock on pensions: but as everyone has chorused - so what?  OK, he's read his Machiavelli about getting your nastiness in early: but is Starmer really sure he's pursuing clever politics here?  There are also loads of ways of cracking the whip in an ostentatious and salutary manner: summary deselection of Mr 'Renters Champion' Athwal would be a start.  But a massive falling-out over an emotive social policy so very easily weaponised by everyone else, just ahead of Party Conference, for just £1.4 bn? 

It's not quite the same, but one is reminded of the wonderful line in Bolt's A Man For All Seasons:  

"It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?"

Break open the popcorn - again.

ND    

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[1] ... and I do know what 'hapless' means, unlike 95% of Guardian writers (And 'elide', ditto ditto.)

[2] Can't find it just now, but some bright researcher has found a clip of Reeves advocating means-testing for the WFA about 6 years ago.  So much for "we didn't want to do this" - she's always wanted to do it! 

Weekend Fun

So this weekend the wife has booked us in to a 'boutique hotel', and I'm sure we'll have a wonderful time.  The establishment offers a range of different rooms, of which this is one.

Wonder what attracted Mrs D's attention to this place ?

ND

Guardian Goings-on(2): Better news - and at Beeb too!

Having recently had a go at the Graun for its evident decision[1] to proselytise actively on behalf of a partisan position on contestable energy issues, this is by way of a follow-up suggesting that things might be looking up, both at the newspaper and also at the Beeb.

The paper first.  At the weekend, their rather good columnist[2] Sonia Sodha had this to say: 

Free speech is neither a “nice to have” nor a rightwing project: it is a fundamental tenet of democracy and when it is under threat, it is disempowered minorities who suffer most. Labour needs to stop seeing important free speech protections introduced by Tory ministers as expendable fuel for attacking their predecessors.

And on a quite different topic, Nils Bratley opined as follows: 

... before Drax is promised a penny extra from billpayers, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, should commission a properly independent review of the business model of burning wood pellets to generate electricity. It should cover both the environmental impact ... and the stupendous subsidies.

I strongly applaud both sentiments.  And both are clearly opinion pieces, which is the honourable way to go for a proper newspaper.

Now for the Beeb.  I am delighted to note that they have genuinely got their teeth into two stories that essentially reflect a proper critique / criticism of Starmer's Labour Party.  The first is the Winter Fuel payments issue, which Reeves and Starmer have strongly signalled they intend to tough out - it's in that category we highlighted of Reasons Aplenty for Ruthless Whipping.  But, patently, they can't be taking any pleasure in the way it's rumbling on.  The awful Alastair Campbell used to say that if an awkward story runs for more than 3 days, you've got a problem.  Well, this one is several weeks and counting, and the Beeb has taken it to its heart in ways that make the problem worse for the government.  As well they might - it's an early unforced error and an acute political test for Labour: but personally I had felt there'd be a longer period where the uncritical pre-election fawning over Starmer would be continuing in that quarter.  Seemingly not[3].  This isn't any more than their charter requires of them, but given past performance it's moderately encouraging.  Credit where it's due.

The send is their gleeful playing-up of the outrageous story of "Parliament's biggest landlord", the reprehensible Jas Athwal MP.  One has to pick through issues like this with caution, but in the background there's the sordid prevalence of a certain type of landlord mercilessly exploiting tenants of the same ethnicity as themselves - "own-country landlord" is generally how the victims ruefully express their plight.  Maybe Mr Athwal's portfolio is not of this profile - but the Beeb evidently knows.  Their ability to report on renters' profiles has however been hampered by the fact that the people they got interviews from were subsequently intimidated into silence, as the Beeb reported, and withdrew permission for their statements to be used.  Reasonable people will doubtless draw their own conclusions.  The Beeb clearly has it in for Athwal - a man parachuted into his seat in Labour's nasty little pre-election deselection campaign - and, often with smiles on their faces when reporting his twisting and turning, seems determined to run him to ground.  Once again, credit where it's due, & plaudits to them for their journalism.  

ND

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[1]  By way of explicit ratification, here's their resident green wingnut George Monbiot: 

"For every pound or dollar spent on ['climate crisis'] persuasion by an environmental charity or newspaper ..."

[2]  Inter alia, she's broadly sound on the baleful 'trans' issue, too.  How much sh*t must she get from the fundies at the Graun?

[3]  Of course, anti Starmer animus can easily come from several angles: many lefties hate him cordially, as much as does anyone with the slightest regards for probity & intellectual integrity

Battle of Kursk (2024) Revisited: illuminated by flames

It is well over three weeks of Ukraine's incursion into Kursk.  If they so choose, they can easily extend this into next month, maybe longer: the word in Moscow is that Putin has set his birthday (in October) as the deadline[1] for expelling them.  

His policy is consistent with the 'Stalin 1941' approach he has generally taken when hit with an unexpected blow: lie low for a bit (doubtless squaring away various issues and people behind the scenes), then tough things out - the policy equivalent of trading space for time, always Russia's default reaction.  Would be deeply unsatisfactory from the standard western point of view as regards being seen to respond with urgency, but doesn't seem to bother most Russians very much ("wait till the Tsar finds out ...").  Meanwhile his Donbas advance continues - with faint signs that manoeuvre warfare might even be breaking out there too.  Oh, the rush to get things done before the US election!

Putin's policy of not troubling too much over Kursk may be assisted by a phenomenon noted in France during WW1.  Primitive opinion-surveys determined that the population in the south of France - many hundreds of miles from Verdun - didn't care very much at all about what was happening elsewhere: northern France's peril didn't seem to move them.  The French powers-that-be took this so amiss, they instituted (inter alia) the rigid, universal school curriculum that had every French kid taught exactly the same thing - i.e. whatever the government dictated - at exactly the same time, wherever they were.  Knowing first-hand how brutally racist Russians are towards Ukrainians, it seems possible (though personally I have no evidence) that Muscovites don't view deep-south Kursk residents in a particularly sympathetic way either.  In any event, that 'word from Moscow' also has it that Russia as a whole is not much troubled by the Kursk incursion, distinctly limited in geographical scope as it will always be, however long or short. 

While we await further developments on all these fronts, Ukraine's ultra-successful drone-strike campaign is having a genuine effect on Russian oil supplies, petro-facilities being nigh impossible to defend.  The standard official Russian line is usually that "a drone was shot down over the refinery / whatever, and fragments caused a fire that subsequently spread".  Everyone knows this means the attack was successful: and as one milblogger acidly wrote, shooting down a high-explosive drone directly over its target is likely to be "a posthumous achievement" - for both the shooter and the target itself.  Incidentally, the fact that one of these fires has raged for 12 days now (and counting) tells this old oilman that the Russians have failed to fit non-return valves in their oil infrastructure (i.e. the fire is being fed by oil still arriving unpreventably into the facility from the pipelines it is connected to) - which isn't even remotely surprising: their whole set-up is truly primitive by western standards.  They'll no more be able to retrofit valves in a hurry than land a cosmonaut on the moon[2] - indeed, they probably won't even be able to buy them.

Of course, they can and will source oil from elsewhere and truck it in.  The lines of logistics, though, start to get very stretched indeed[3].  

ND  

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[1] Of course, Putin's deadlines, like his 'red lines', are eminently flimsy, as has been proven so often it's a wonder he still sets them.

[2] Amazingly (by western standards), the Russians have even attempted to bring the blaze under control by holding a prayer meeting at the oil depot in question, complete with saintly relics.  Sadly for these pious folk, an oil tank took the opportunity to explode during the ceremony.  Still: always gotta admire piety.

[3] Also, there will be a lot of folk taking a cut in such an ad hoc operation.  The beauty of fixed delivery-infrastructure is that once built, it's relatively hard for the usual embezzlement to take place along the supply chain.  But an operation based on thousands upon thousands of trucks ...

Guardian Goings-on (1) Electric Vehicles

For a while now, it's been clear that the Grauniad isn't just broadly on the side of the greens (hardly surprising), but that it has a positive editorial policy of proselytising, not to mention smoking up the embarrassing facts.  For example, it ran a 'myth-busting' series on heat pumps, which was straining every sinew to say "heat pumps are wonderful, don't let anyone tell you otherwise", except that the last residues of journalistic integrity forced it to admit that the first half of that statement needs qualifying (heavily) in several dimensions, to the point where the second part looks pretty silly.  Likewise, it ran a series on how wonderful electric vehicles are, not to worry about recharging etc.

Except, actually, EV drivers seem to fall out of love with their costly acquisitions, subsidised or not (and notwithstanding the acceleration, hohoh, with which even J.Clarkson is supposed to be deeply in love).  This clearly manifests itself in something long suspected by skeptics, namely that the resale value of EVs is turning out to be pitiful.  This is, incidentally, for very good reasons.

Someone in the trade has decided the ideal place for an attempt to arrest this highly damaging phenomenon is, of course, the Graun.  Which has obligingly let fly with a lengthy, risible puff-piece trying to talk up second-hand EVs: ‘Spectacular bargains’: why now is a great time to buy a used electric car in the UK.  

What sort of journalist could take pride in being told to write such tosh?  I haven't heard quite so much disingenuous 'talking his own book' nonsense since the Beeb allowed a representative of the used car fraternity to announce that, during some pronounced downturn in new car sales a few years ago, it would mean that prices of second-hand cars would be going up!  (... 'because nobody wants a new car, so they'll be buying second-hand cars instead and demand will go up'.  FFS, man, if there's a recession in car buying it'll hit the entire sector!)

Well, I suppose Kath Viner feels it's all hands to the pump.  I look forward to the next in this series - perhaps "why doesn't your village volunteer to have a small nuke planted next door?  You could get up a petition ..."

More on this 'journalistic' behaviour to follow.

ND