This particular story warrants further examination. Firstly, the Home Office wouldn't have done an Impact Assessment but for the pressure put on them by one of the select committees.
The impact assessment contains the sentence: "'The Home Office believes that despite these points the changes are justified for a number of policy reasons including reducing net migration and ending reliance on overseas recruitment. '
Of course the lease price is largely related to depreciation over the lease period and the differential between the sticker price and resale value, and not directly to the value of the car, so simply banning certain marques is a question of optics (if the manufacturers had the stones they could probably sue the government under Competition Law).
Depreciation is not unrelated to the purchase price, though. Cars tend to depreciate by percentages...
Politicians are certainly not 'all the same' to me - the SNP, the Scottish Greens, the English and Welsh Greens, Plaid Cymru and even the Lib Dems are not cut from this cloth.
Past evidence is that lib dems will happily cheer on welfare cuts if it gets them a ministerial car. They might not be quite so eager with the racism but I wouldn't count on it. We already know what kind of party they are, it's just a matter of haggling over their price.
The FT link is paywalled - not that I necessarily disagree with the point you’re making. The same issue is covered by The Economic Times though I’ve no idea of the quality of that source.
The FT link is paywalled - not that I necessarily disagree with the point you’re making. The same issue is covered by The Economic Times though I’ve no idea of the quality of that source.
The figures are available on page 60 of the report (table at the bottom of the page). Their best case is buoyed up by a number of dubious assumptions - e.g that the decrease in workforce available to the care sector will lead to an increase in productivity.
The FT link is paywalled - not that I necessarily disagree with the point you’re making. The same issue is covered by The Economic Times though I’ve no idea of the quality of that source.
The figures are available on page 60 of the report (table at the bottom of the page). Their best case is buoyed up by a number of dubious assumptions - e.g that the decrease in workforce available to the care sector will lead to an increase in productivity.
Are they under the impression that care workers are slacking or are they expecting mass robot deployment?
Looks like the end result of Mandelson's latest ousting has been to leave Starmer damaged, but no MP willing to challenge for now - presumably the soft left are having difficulty getting numbers behind a candidate and Streeting is keeping a low profile (he appears to have deleted several tweets).
Looks like the end result of Mandelson's latest ousting has been to leave Starmer damaged, but no MP willing to challenge for now - presumably the soft left are having difficulty getting numbers behind a candidate and Streeting is keeping a low profile (he appears to have deleted several tweets).
Streeting is presumably hoping no-one remembers how pally he was with Mandelson.
In his case it's not much of a virtue as he's still an ablist transphobic far-right appeaser with racist-friendly anti-immigration policies and terrible policy on technology and AI. Streeting would be worse though.
As someone who has to limit their news intake for mental health reasons, are things at Labour HQ really collapsing over Mandelson and the Epstein papers? It seems astonishing to me that this is what it takes - not downplaying the issues with Mandelson's relationship with Epstein or suggesting that it shouldn't be resulting in resignations, it just shocks me that so much else has been treated as "business as usual".
I think the revelations in the US were sufficient that it couldn't be ignored totally, although there's an element of acting to restrict the blast radius and make it an issue of a few individuals.
Starmer is still not out of the woods. He is unpopular with voters. MPs will be weighing up that with loyalty to the leadership. The Mandleson situation has only made the voters like him less.
Labour Together - the grouping behind Starmer - paid for oppo research on reporters after various outlets printed a story about them failing to declare donations of £730K:
Days after the article appeared, Josh Simons, who had by then succeeded McSweeney as head of Labour Together and is now a Cabinet Office minister, commissioned Apco to look into it. McSweeney was aware of the decision. The Sunday Times has a copy of the full report, dated January 2024, codenamed “Operation Cannon” and marked “private and confidential”. It was prepared by Tom Harper, Apco’s senior director and a former Sunday Times employee. Labour Together has admitted hiring the firm but the details of its report — and the scale of Apco’s efforts to discredit the story — have never been told.
Harper wrote that he had examined the “sourcing, funding and origins of The Sunday Times story” using documents and “discreet human source enquiries”.
He then sought to portray Pogrund and Yorke as part of a Russian campaign to damage Starmer.
He alleged, without evidence, that the emails which underpinned the published story were likely to have emerged from a suspected Kremlin hack of the Electoral Commission.
Comments
This particular story warrants further examination. Firstly, the Home Office wouldn't have done an Impact Assessment but for the pressure put on them by one of the select committees.
The impact assessment contains the sentence: "'The Home Office believes that despite these points the changes are justified for a number of policy reasons including reducing net migration and ending reliance on overseas recruitment. '
The points are contained in Annex B here:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6937e67eb612700b2cb73679/Spring_2025_Immigration_Rules_Impact_Assessment__Skilled_Worker_and_Care_Worker___003_.pdf
And amount to 'It costs more and is bad for disabled and old people who require care'.
Meanwhile Mike Tapp - the Home Office Minister - was out stirring the pot on 'grooming gangs'
https://x.com/MikeTappTweets/status/1998464759855792218
And to avoid 'what Starmer really said' style arguments, here is the accompanying piece to which he put his name:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/protect-borders-defend-democracies-echr-keir-starmer-mette-frederiksen
And an accompanying article about the Justice Secretary pushing to weaken the provisions on torture:
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec/08/rights-groups-warn-uk-weaken-torture-protections-echr
Along with the reduction of jury trials, a wonderful set of precedents for Farage should Reform win next time around.
Depreciation is not unrelated to the purchase price, though. Cars tend to depreciate by percentages...
Past evidence is that lib dems will happily cheer on welfare cuts if it gets them a ministerial car. They might not be quite so eager with the racism but I wouldn't count on it. We already know what kind of party they are, it's just a matter of haggling over their price.
The figures are available on page 60 of the report (table at the bottom of the page). Their best case is buoyed up by a number of dubious assumptions - e.g that the decrease in workforce available to the care sector will lead to an increase in productivity.
Are they under the impression that care workers are slacking or are they expecting mass robot deployment?
Streeting is presumably hoping no-one remembers how pally he was with Mandelson.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/e5efccd6-cc25-4e86-8900-f33c304f7188
They then tried to pin the story on Russia: