What is going on in the UK?

[EnglishEdward]

I know that some peoples determination to find fault with other
people requires them to desperately misconstrue what I typed.


The theory of burning wood in DRAX and elsewhere instead of
coal was that if coal was burned that would simply increase
atmospheric CO2, but that if wood was burnt from old forests instead,
those old forests would be replaced with new forests which would
absorb CO2 equivalent to that lost by burning the old forests timber.

Now this theory completely ignored the fact that extra CO2 was involved
in cutting and transporting the timber, but more seriously it assumed
that the land where the old forests (or its equivalent) would be kept for new
forests and those replacement forests would naturally grow or be planted.

If the area where the old forest was remains barren mountain, reverts to
tundra, becomes a prairie, or is turned over to agriculture or building etc,
the new forest does not grow. This has two implications; firstly the
omitted quantity of CO2 is not recaptured and secondly that any
net C02 absorption that the old forest was making ceases.

There is no mechanised to ensure that felled old forest is replaced by
new forest, so the theory fails - hence my "misplaced environmentalism".

 

[Senethro]

I know that some peoples determination to find fault with other
people requires them to desperately misconstrue what I typed.


The theory of burning wood in DRAX and elsewhere instead of
coal was that if coal was burned that would simply increase
atmospheric CO2, but that if wood was burnt from old forests instead,
those old forests would be replaced with new forests which would
absorb CO2 equivalent to that lost by burning the old forests timber.

Now this theory completely ignored the fact that extra CO2 was involved
in cutting and transporting the timber, but more seriously it assumed
that the land where the old forests (or its equivalent) would be kept for new
forests and those replacement forests would naturally grow or be planted.

If the area where the old forest was remains barren mountain, reverts to
tundra, becomes a prairie, or is turned over to agriculture or building etc,
the new forest does not grow. This has two implications; firstly the
omitted quantity of CO2 is not recaptured and secondly that any
net C02 absorption that the old forest was making ceases.

There is no mechanised to ensure that felled old forest is replaced by
new forest, so the theory fails - hence my "misplaced environmentalism".

Its not environmentalism at all, because the idea is entirely stupid and always has been. Lies from foundation to roof. Its doubly stupid when valuable ecological assets replaceable only on the centuries long scale are consumed once for a single time profit.

To call it misplaced environmentalism is a slur on environmentalism. Its commercial interests using politics to get preferred access for their product, or to restrict that of competitors. Consent manufacturing for burning things, comparable to the way car based societies are doing absolutely everything to avoid improving their public transport, the actual low carbon solution.

We could fix it if we wanted to and we could do it without excessive hardship inflicted upon marginalized groups in our society, but we've clearly lost control of our government and/or it doesn't have the power to oppose established commercial interests.

 

[EnglishEdward]

IIRC the UK politicians wanted to claim they were meeting reduced CO2 targets and bought into it in the context of environmentalism.

 

[Samson]

UK Government Does The Right Thing SHOCKER!!!

We have to remember that Gaza was not bad enough for us to stop flying recon flights for Israel, but this is too much.

UK suspends some intelligence sharing with US over boat strike concerns in major break

The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The UK’s decision marks a significant break from its closest ally and intelligence sharing partner and underscores the growing skepticism over the legality of the US military’s campaign around Latin America.

For years, the UK, which controls a number of territories in the Caribbean where it bases intelligence assets, has helped the US locate vessels suspected of carrying drugs so that the US Coast Guard could interdict them, the sources said. That meant the ships would be stopped, boarded, its crew detained, and drugs seized.

The intelligence was typically sent to Joint Interagency Task Force South, a task force stationed in Florida that includes representatives from a number of partner nations and works to reduce the illicit drug trade.

But shortly after the US began launching lethal strikes against the boats in September, however, the UK grew concerned that the US might use intelligence provided by the British to select targets. British officials believe the US military strikes, which have killed 76 people, violate international law, the sources said. The intelligence pause began over a month ago, they said.

 

[Kaitzilla]

What's this?

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bbc-crisis-what-caused-it-what-happens-next-2025-11-11/

LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The BBC is battling its biggest crisis in decades after...

BBC - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The oldest and largest local and global broadcaster by stature and by number of employees, the BBC employs over 21,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 17,200 are in public-sector broadcasting

 

[Samson]

What's this?

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bbc-crisis-what-caused-it-what-happens-next-2025-11-11/

BBC - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Trump threatened to sue the beeb for $1 billion because of how they edited his speech, so the board got rid of the head for not being quite right wing enough. It happens every so often, last time was in 2004 when they suggested that the plot of the rock may not have been a good enough reason to go to war.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I suspect that they were only guilty of trying to make his speech more sensible.

A foolish decision as that is an impossible task for mere mortals.

Right - well that should let King Charles III off the hook for further hosting.

 

[Akka]

There is nothing magic about the CO2 produced from
burning forests as opposed to the CO2 from burning coal.

No, there is nothing magical. There is just the obvious difference that forest takes CO² from atmosphere, so burning them is net zero, while coal is extracted from the ground, so burning it release more CO² in the atmosphere.
The problem is the source of the wood, not burning wood itself.

 

[Samson]

Wes Streeting says the BMA is like a cartel

The closest thing the doctors have to a union, the BMA, is spectacularly tightly bound to the system such that it can be considered closer to the employers than the members. The health secretary thinks they are a cartel.

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

What's this?

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bbc-crisis-what-caused-it-what-happens-next-2025-11-11/

BBC - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The BBC it would seem is not the neutral observer its government funding would otherwise suggest. And the Trump edits seem to be just one of their problems, based on the internal report.

But like with NPR in America, it seems they could easily forgo public money and thus run whatever it is they want to run...

 

[Samson]

What I am trying to work out is how the UK Government Cyber security page has an alert window with the style somewhere between Windows 3.1 and 95?

Tough new laws to strengthen the UK's defences against cyber attacks on NHS, transport and energy Published 12 November 2025

Spoiler Win 3.1 and 95 Aesthetic :

 

[Samson]

Facial recognition vans rolled out to seven more police forces

THE expansion of facial recognition will further erode civil liberties and “disproportionately immiserate” marginalised communities, campaigners warned today.

Home Office funding has been provided for the rollout of a new fleet of facial recognition vans across police forces in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire.

The technology, already in use across Metropolitan, South Wales, and Essex forces, allows officers to record the surrounding area using cameras mounted on top of their vans.

Police watchlists are uploaded to the van, and if their faces are scanned by the van’s cameras it will alert officers to the match.

Civil groups had previously raised concerns about false readings. Anti-knife crime community worker Shaun Thompson is currently taking legal action against the Met after the technology wrongly flagged him as a criminal.

But Surrey Police chief inspector Andy Hill insisted that there had been “a lot of development” and “a lot of national testing” to give the force confidence in the software.

Habib Kadiri, executive director of Stopwatch which campaigns against police stop-and-search tactics, said: “Judging from police forces’ current use, it seems the expected benefits from use of this technology for public safety will be minimal at best.

“But we know for certain that the spread of these checkpoint-scanning sites will further cement the loss of our civil liberties and the intention to surveil so-called ‘high-crime’ areas will disproportionately immiserate marginalised people in racialised neighbourhoods, while the lack of legal safeguards for its use leaves people living under this new technology open to police abuses of power.”

There is no legislation dedicated to regulating live facial recognition (LFR), with its governance fragmented under decades-old policing laws, such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, as well as data and human rights legislation.

Sara Chitseko, from Open Rights Group, said: “We urgently need Parliament to legislate for the use of this intrusive technology to ensure that there is proper transparency and oversight.”

 

[EnglishEdward]

@ Samson

My primary concern about this is that the technology will simply be an inefficient use of money.

There are plenty of instances of peoples' bicycles being stolen e.g. locked at railway stations
where there is ample CCTV footage that is never examined because of a lack of resource.
And public money spent on high tech competes with money spent on deploying humans.

There is also a degree of weasel wording covering a lack of logic in the article's criticism

intention to surveil so-called ‘high-crime’ areas will disproportionately
immiserate marginalised people in racialised neighbourhoods,

Reported crime is mapped so why is the "so-called" qualifier used.

And it would hardly make sense to prioritise installment in low crime rate locations.

And racial minorities living in racialised neighbourhoods are the victims of crime.
While false positives are a nuisance, I'd have thought that a time wasting police
stop is better for the law abiding than being mugged. Should such technology be
instead deployed near millionaires' mansions leaving the poorer areas neglected.

 

[Samson]

The Economic Impact of Brexit

This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

 

[EnglishEdward]

@ Samson:

Well, I can only see their abstract that you listed.

Looking at https://www.ons.gov.uk/datasets/gdp-to-four-decimal-places/editions/time-series/versions/62

I downloaded a sample of each July from 2015 to 2025,
and I totalled across the categories and this is what I got

July

2015 2572
2016 2684
2017 2736
2018 2729
2019 2823
2020 2482
2021 2635
2022 2716
2023 2705
2024 2712
2025 2766

Whether I'd have got a different picture, if I'd totalled for other months;
I know not. (Something about life too short for peeling mushrooms.)

A big dip during Covid, in 2020, but otherwise fairly flat; with no sign of a 6% to 8% decline.

By the way I suspect that there has been a decline in UK GDP, covered up by the way
they deal with inflation in the rental market and imputed income for home owners.

And that would be why our Chancellor Rachel Reeves has a problem with the budget.

 

[Kaitzilla]

I suspect that they were only guilty of trying to make his speech more sensible.

A foolish decision as that is an impossible task for mere mortals.

Right - well that should let King Charles III off the hook for further hosting.

Here is the BBC's Trump edit.

*Edit*
The original also seems edited a bit in the middle heh

Anyway, the heads of the BBC resigning might not be enough to stop a lawsuit if the BBC regularly does these kinds of edits.

 

[Samson]

Here is the BBC's Trump edit.

It would be more informative if they included what he said just before he said "We are going to fight like hell".

 

[EnglishEdward]

I lack the courage to unnecessarily watch more Trump.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I lack the courage to unnecessarily watch more Trump.

We all do, we all do.

 

[Samson]

The protesters locked up for trying to change the world

In March this year, [Sam Griffiths who attached himself to an oil refinery’s pipework using a padlock] was sentenced to 16 months in prison for reckless and culpable conduct – the first time Scotland had imprisoned an environmental activist for non-violent direct action. Between 1932 and 2018, it was almost unheard of for environmental activists to be sentenced to prison. Since 2018, an estimated 120 have been locked up. This shift does not only relate to climate protest: 33 pro-Palestine protesters are on remand.

Yet in 2003 Starmer, then a human rights lawyer, was part of a team defending n almost identical case to Brize Norton. On the eve of the Iraq war, five people were charged with planning to disable planes at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, in Gloucestershire. Their lawyers concocted a novel defence: the Fairford Five were justified in their actions because they were preventing greater harm. Starmer argued the case at the court of appeal and, later, at the House of Lords, and while the defendants were ultimately not acquitted, it produced a pivotal judgment by Lord Hoffmann.

“Civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country,” Hoffmann wrote, referencing the legacy of the suffragettes. “It is the mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind.” Protesters were expected to behave “with a sense of proportion”, the police and prosecutors “with restraint”, and magistrates would “impose sentences which take the conscientious motives of the protesters into account”. Hoffmann’s dicta became a touchstone. “Everyone used to go to court. We’d say that’s what the supreme court says, and we used to get our conditional discharges, or occasionally a fine,” says Raj Chada, a criminal lawyer who has represented hundreds of protesters over two decades.

Two weeks after Labour was elected, in July 2024, five members of Just Stop Oil were sentenced to four and five years in prison for conspiring to disrupt traffic, the longest sentences yet for peaceful protest in the UK. Typically, protesters have been permitted to explain their motivations in court to justify their actions and mitigate their sentences, as per Hoffmann’s dicta, but here the judge instructed the jury to disregard the defendants’ philosophical and political beliefs – part of a growing trend.

The UK remains an outlier, arresting climate and environmental protesters at three times the average global rate