I 100% agree. I was talking about what I think Labour should do if it wants to stay relevant in British politics, not what I believe we, as a country, should do.
I’m not sure I agree. That’s not me saying Labour’s leadership is competent.
But we keep circling around “the message just isn’t being heard”.
I think the message js being heard fine, it’s just that people disagree with it. Labour’s core philosophy around how we should treat refugees and asylum seekers just doesn’t line up with what many voters believe.
Until we recognise that people, rightly or wrongly (I believe it’s wrongly, but that’s beside the point), feel immigration really genuinely is too high, and “we should take care of our own first”, Labour will, I think, continue to lose (as will the Tories) and Reform will continue to gain.
The social democrats of Denmark “solved” this. And when I say “solved”, I simply mean they adopted a policy on immigration that I personally don’t agree with, but one which has kept the more extreme views out of too much influence. Their argument, at least the public argument, is that “immigration puts pressure on those with few resources first” and “to look after those people, we need to curb immigration”. They call this “good social democratic policy”, and call out that immigration can’t be seen as more important than looking after those we’ve got.
If Labour wants to regain relevance in the industrial ghost-towns, they have to move towards an expressed and inacted “harder line” on immigration.
I don’t think they will, or can, or should. And therefore we are seeing weird FPTP results all around the country (LibDem suddenly have a huge chance of winning my own constituency, where before they were a remote third), but with an overall push towards Reform UK.
If you really want to change that picture, supporting our education system so that people vote backed by data, not by emotions, is the real change we need. But that doesn’t serve anyone - the uneducated can much more easily be told what to believe and thus vote.
The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.
However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.
GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.
GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.
Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.
Meh I don’t know; took my daughter’s phone in for a new battery. Came out on same battery max capacity percentage as it went in. He argued “it takes a while to go up”, I argued that a proper chipped battery would show up immediately.
We didn’t agree and I got some money back. But it all felt pretty sketchy tbh.
Personally it looks to me like a bunch of people don’t give a shit about others and conveniently push away uncomfortable discussions about the consequences of the decisions they take.
But that it still a far cry from Bond-villain “let’s kill them by taking their water”.
Perhaps some, agreed. Perhaps even all. But the 1.7tn she refers to is the market size, which is not the same as the value of what could potentially be sold.
She’s not selling 1.7tn of Venezuela’s assets. She’s saying she will open a 1.7tn market (ie a market with a total revenue of 1.7tn) for foreign investment.
It doesn’t make it better, necessarily, but it does make a difference.
I could not agree more. It’s a minor axis dominated by much bigger forces, serving as nothing but a distraction while the rich get richer.