Politically, this is magnificent. The Lib Dems have target seats throughout Surrey where they’re typically the main challenger, they’ve been campaigning hard locally on water quality through most of this parliament (hasn’t always got national attention but they worked out a while ago it’s a very resonant issue in their target seats) and then just in time for the election Thames Water start warning people the water isn’t drinkable…

That’s one conviction for every Big Mac he’s eaten this week.

Yes, having an election is a normal thing in a democracy.

Definitely not needed for current military needs. Britain effectively operates a relatively small but relatively elite army - trying to incorporate a large number of untrained teenagers into that model would seem like an enormous and unhelpful distraction. The bigger issue the army faces today is a lack of funding.

This is really just a headline he’s come up with to appeal to reactionary elderly Tory voters who are thinking about switching to Reform. It’s the worst way to make policy. The more you scratch under the surface, the more problematic the policy is.

Reminder that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is not ‘the media’. It’s a non-governmental public body created by a Labour government in 2006 to promote and enforce equality legislation introduced by said Labour government.

I mean, is it? Under his leadership the Labour Party broke the law in relation to racism within the party - that was the finding of the independent Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation. It found that on Corbyn’s watch, the culture of the Labour Party ‘at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it’. He was the leader, he is accountable. That was his doing.

He then chose to put out a statement rejecting this and dismissing the evidence of racism suffered by Labour members as exaggerated - as a result of which he was suspended. That statement was his doing too.

And now he has chosen to stand against the Labour candidate in an election - this choice was also his doing.

So which part of this is ‘their doing’?

I love whoever decided to drown out Sunak’s speech (which was inexplicably done outdoors, on a rainy day) with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ on loudspeakers from nearby.

I wonder if it was the same person who played the Benny Hill theme over Boris Johnson’s resignation.

Shall we tax corn while we’re at it?

Because the Palestinian children had nothing to do with the killing of Israeli children? What you’re describing and explicitly trying to justify here is collective punishment of all of the two million Palestinians in Gaza (more than half of whom are children) for the crimes of (by Israel’s estimates) about 3,000 Hamas terrorists on 7 October.

What you’re articulating constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention and that’s exactly why the ICC is getting involved.

Let me try putting this another way. The population of the US state of Nebraska is about two million. Every year, there are about 6,000 violent crimes committed by Nebraskans. Should every Nebraskan be collectively punished for the crimes of those few thousand Nebraskans?

The president isn’t unimportant though. A sad fact about Iranian politics is that the two times they elected a reformist president - Khatami in 1997 and Rouhani in 2013 - it was followed by the election of a Republican president in the US who spat in the face of attempted conciliation.

Bush grouping Shia Iran into his ‘axis of evil’ and trying to link them with Sunni Al-Qaeda, and then Trump’s binning of Obama’s carefully negotiated nuclear agreement, has done an enormous amount to undermine the reformists as ineffective and to strengthen the hardliners around Khamanei. It doesn’t get talked about enough: there’s a weird sort of codependency going on between Khamanei’s crew and the US Republicans.

lily-livered

Hoist the mainsail and shiver me timbers, are they joining the Pirate Party?

I hope Biden wins by a landslide, but his protectionist instincts are such an ugly trait.

“It is a total outrage that there are people who are attacking and looting these convoys coming from Jordan, going to Gaza to deliver humanitarian assistance,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.

"We are looking at the tools that we have to respond to this,” he added. “We are also raising our concerns at the highest level of the Israeli government and it’s something that we make no bones about – this is completely and utterly unacceptable behaviour.”

I find the far-right fear-mongering over 15 minute cities is such a bizarre battle for them to choose to fight.

To the average voter, if you tell them that urban planners want to ensure more of the key amenities people need - GPs, schools, shops, parks, etc - are within walking distance of their home, they would tell you that’s a great idea. Why on earth would anyone pick that as a thing to oppose, unless they’re a moron or they’re paid for by carmakers?

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/nAP27

Good. Down with Nazis.

The homicide rate in the US is about 6-7 times that in the UK per 100,000 population. I’d take our situation any day of the week.

Last time I looked into this properly, knife crime in the US was actually roughly the same frequency as that in the UK. The difference is that knife-based murders stand out in the UK, whereas in the US nobody pays attention because the problem is dwarfed by the much greater problem of rampant gun crime.

The UK is a society where violent crime is pretty uncommon. The homicide rate in the UK was 1.0 per 100,000 population in 2023. That has been broadly trending downwards in recent decades, after rising during the late 20th century and hitting a peak at c1.8 per 100,000 in 2003. The US is a much more violent society: their homicide rate is around 6.4 per 100,000 population.

Killers are always going to find weapons - if you ban guns they’ll find knives, if you ban knives they’ll kill with something else. One difference is that a killer on a knife rampage is going to kill a lot fewer people before they’re stopped than a killer with a gun. I guess killing with a knife is a more ‘involved’ act than just pointing a gun and clicking the trigger, so the bar for someone stabbing with a knife is probably a bit higher than killing from several metres away with a gun.

But part of it is a societal thing - my hunch is that (in relative terms) society in the UK and most other rich Western liberal democracies just instills in people an instinctively higher value on human life. You see it in US exceptionalism in use of the death penalty, the frequency of police killings, etc. I don’t want to exaggerate the difference - the US still has far fewer murders than Colombia or South Africa or Brazil - but there are other Western countries like Canada or Finland where guns are still pretty widely owned (albeit not quite to the extent of the US) that don’t have the same problem of violence as the US.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/BfXD2

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/gfSkR

Human-rights lawyers hope to close some gaps in international law, whether by new agreements (some call for a special tribunal to prosecute Russia for aggression) or by existing courts extending their remit. They also want new curbs on ai and autonomous weapons. But they cannot hold back states bent on violence. Arrest warrants limit leaders’ international travel. But don’t expect to see Mr Putin in the dock.

So what is the point of the court battles? Lawyers offer three answers: to impose a reputational and perhaps economic cost on those who spill blood wantonly; to strengthen the negotiating hand of their victims in future diplomatic talks; and, at a minimum, to establish a credible historical record of atrocities. Confronted with an “epidemic of inhumanity”, Mr Khan has argued, the world must “cling to the law” more tightly. The unspoken danger is that, should he and others fail to curb the horrors, the law will collapse and there will be little left to hold onto.