Getting fees out of clients is like getting blood out of a stone.

Those barristers may not get paid by Tesco for years & not without a fight - they’re prohibited from taking retainers and from turning down cases, and though they can refer cases on to other barristers, the circumstances in which they can do this are very limited.

Correct.

You qualify through low income, and as the list to get council housing is long, need is taken into account also.

Right to Buy allows council tenants to buy their homes at a substantial discount on market value. This is alright, as it promotes stability and gives tenants equity, but at the same time, council tenants don’t get evicted anyhow, even if their income has become very high, and you can pass on a tenancy when you die if a relative was living in the council house with you.

But the money from the sale of council houses to tenants does not get ploughed back into buying or building more council housing, and the people who bought them can in turn sell them on the open market rather than back to the council.

This has made it near impossible for councils to maintain levels of housing stock, let alone increase it to reflect population growth. In central London, many types of essential worker are hard to obtain as too few can afford to live within commuting distance - large & high quality housing estates in the centre and all through the Boroughs having been sold off under the scheme long ago & snaffled up by developers.

Thatcher brought it in as a populist policy, and to weaken state services, but every other PM after permitted the policy to carry on unaltered.

Most of them seem closer to being wrong’uns than weird.

It is only working in the US context as it isn’t an insult per se, yet really gets under the skin of their conservatives due to their obsession with conformity, and enables everyone to mock their ludicrous ideas without expending energy explaining why each of them are so awful.

Entirely different groups of people, and they’re profoundly opposed to each other.

At the core of this massive protest/strike are groups which have been against the bombardment of Gaza from the outset, and protesting Israel’s war against Palestinians for years.

Tell people you vaguely know, too.

Right now, they can’t.

Money has gone, opportunity for very cheap borrowing (which is what a sane government would have grasped enthusiastically grasped in the wake of the last crash instead of breaking out to exploit everyone harder) is gone.

Maybe, if Reeves is given scope to do her shit, this country can not merely stall the accelerating decline, but turn stuff around.

Nothing is more vital right now & for some time than keeping faith against the odds that that can happen.

There is nothing to lose by trying to hold our nerve.

Here’s hoping they prevail & that they inspire others either way.

Do like the slogan on that banner.

It is also a natural thing to think of, and easy for anyone over the age of 7 or 8 to figure out how to do it effectively.

Lol no and he knows it.

Goddamn charlatan, wasting money for the sake of it, along with the rest of his party.

That too, in that they don’t want seasonal agricultural workers to feel secure, because then they can be abused harder on pain of summary deportation, but they also need enough young British people to stay put to keep everything else afloat both through their direct labour, through the services made possible from the taxes they pay, and from the competition their expertise and economic effect they provide if they remain in the UK.

Seems someone is scared that all their young people would hightail off to Europe…

Makes one nervous that this will be yet another scandal in which postmasters & postmistresses end up under attack…

He probably needs to go strong on corruption, incompetence, divisiveness & wilful destruction.

Labour have had to shift a long way to the right to win under current conditions. Left wing voters may mostly still turn out for them, even if they are (at best) dismayed & frustrated, but centrist & right wing voters, who may be just fine with the policies, aren’t necessarily aware of the change in direction, or are unclear where Labour now stands, or are unsure that Labour means what it is offering.

Getting all of these enthused enough to get to the polls and to vote Labour, despite their various misgivings, consequently seems more likely to come down to faith in Labour’s integrity than on policy.

There’s still this pernicious idea, which overrides evidence & lived-experience, that conservatism is inherently more responsible, and that liberalism & leftism are immature & erratic. Overcoming that perception is a massive hurdle and the importance of limbering up to do so cannot be overstated.

Unfortunately, until capture of the press is addressed, Labour remain reliant on very Tory media for a win.

Once they’re in office they can do as they please.

But even if they don’t turn away from neoliberalism, they’re still massively preferable to Tories, simply because they’re markedly less corrupt, because they’re broadly competent & because they act in good faith even if I might strongly disagree with some policies.

Lesser evil is less evil. They are not the same.

CNN is covering it this evening, along with some of his other recent announcements (which amount to rounding up his political enemies & millions more besides), but infuriatingly still downplaying what his vision entails, nor how popular that is with Republican voters.

Of course, but there’s a whole lot of destruction they wish to wreak before relinquishing power to make it all the harder for Labour to reverse the damage. They definitely don’t want Labour to be able to get beyond reversing damage & onto instituting good things!

Meantime, they retain opportunities to carry on grifting until the next election.

Incompetence & bad ideas are one thing (governance is genuinely hard & complex after all), but they’re not even operating in semi-reasonable faith.

The BBC has had a lot of TERFy journalists (as has The Guardian), so could be they intentionally ran with the line used by this disaffiliated GPW group.

Of course you are.