Reading Time: 3 minutes When other governments are involved in nefarious acts of nepotism that line the pockets of their administration or those of their cronies and friends, we call them out for being corrupt. South America, Africa, Asia: corrupt governments! But when this happens in broad daylight, under our noses, in our own countries (reporting from the UK), […]
UK politics
Posted inEconomics
UK economy crisis: Living standards now in freefall
Reading Time: 3 minutes You know things are bad when acronyms are queuing up to give you bad news. In quick succession, we have had expert organizations warning of our imminent economic and cost-of-living woes. First, at the end of September, the ONS (the Office for National Statistics) announced that GDP grew only 0.2% in the three months to […]
Posted inEnvironment
Sunak’s climate flip-flop: Optics over ethics
Reading Time: 2 minutes New UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, incurred the wrath of opposition parties, environmentalists, many in his own party, members of the UK public, and other global leaders when he announced that he was not attending the Cop27 climate conference in Egypt next week. The surprise was warranted. The UK has not only been traditionally strong […]
Posted inPolitics
New UK Prime Minister Sunak puts wrong foot forward
Reading Time: 2 minutes It has been a matter of days since Rishi Sunak took the helm of the good ship Britannia, hoping to keep a politically sinking ship afloat. What can we learn from the short time he has been in charge? It turns out, quite a bit. Sunak, a previous Chancellor of the Exchequer (a role that […]
Posted inPolitics
How did Truss happen? A UK observer explains
Reading Time: 4 minutes For those looking at British politics from the outside, the short but chaotic leadership of now-former PM Liz Truss must be baffling. A brief in-country explainer may help. The previously-resigned Prime Minister Boris Johnson was ousted by his own party for successive scandals and pathological lying. This should not have been surprising: Johnson had been […]
Posted inPolitics
In taxes we Truss—six weeks of chaos in UK politics
Reading Time: 3 minutes At the moment, six weeks seems an eternity in UK politics. Six weeks is how long Liz Truss has been at the helm. And what a squall it is that is battering her boat, poorly equipped for such high seas after years of maintenance cutbacks. Fun fact: I have perishables in my fridge from four […]
Posted inLGBTQ News
Well, Boris Johnson, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into!
Reading Time: 4 minutes From Brexit through to the Partygate scandal, Britain’s posturing prat of a prime minister managed to turn the UK into an international laughing stock—and he’s now landed the country in another pickle over the cancellation of an international LGBT+ conference his own administration organized. Last year, the Conservative government called on businesses and individuals to […]
Posted inPolitics
What’s Wrong with the Left: The Mechanisms of Voting and Rigging the System
Reading Time: 11 minutes This is part two in my series on the subject. The first started with: I was asked the other day “what is wrong with the left?” or “where has the left gone wrong?” This is presumably in the context of the UK since this is quite a different political environment to the US, although there […]
Posted inPolitics
Disenfranchised and Disenchanted: Reflections on the UK Local Elections
Reading Time: 7 minutes Things are bleak in the UK. We are in a very desperate situation whereby we are still, after 11 years, being ruled by an incompetent, corrupt right-wing populist party with our own British Trump (the difference being that he can read Classics) fooling the British people with his buffoonery that he is somehow competent in […]
Posted inComedy, Politics
The Protest: Trump Lies Again. (And Some Awesome Placards)
Reading Time: 5 minutes Trump is a serial liar. There is so much I could write about concerning his visit to the UK: that the US taxpayer is funding Trump family holidays for everyone to get glitzy photos; that right-wingers in the UK are identifying Trump with Brexit, and attacking London Mayor Sadiq Khan along those lines; that the […]