I despise Galloway for a lot of very obvious reasons. He’s a contrarian piece of shit and he is a deeply unpleasant person on an individual level.
That said, as a UK voter who is further to the left of anyone in the current Parliamentary Labour Party, I am… not displeased about the fact that his win in Rochdale might mean that the PLP actually takes left-wing voters seriously.
I genuinely hate the guy but I don’t feel in any way represented by Starmer’s Labour party, and I resent the idea that people calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (or for Keynesian economics generally) have been thoroughly denounced as “Trot entryists” in recent years, in both the right-wing press and amongst the Labour party generally.
Maybe, just maybe, Galloway’s win in Rochdale might shift some of the Labour party’s focus from “how can we convince Northern racists to vote for us” to “how can we represent a significant number of people who feel let down by centrism?”
While I am wishing for miracles, I would also like a unicorn and a Ferrari. Can’t hurt, right?
AI to fix UK Civil Service’s bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets
The UK government will trial large language models to help ministers analyze and draft documents as part of a push to overhaul public services using AI.
In a speech on Thursday, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden called the technology a potential “silver bullet” to reduce the burden of routine admin tasks and make civil servants more productive.
The UK has already copied Australia’s particular flavour of cruelty to refugees (Rwanda, barge hotels). Looks like they also like what Australia did with automating the civil service.
Key points about the Australian automation:
It used a simple but unreliable algorithm
It compared average income over a tax year with the benefits received in the same period. This only makes sense if you’re early a steady amount of pay month-to-month. Surprise: most of the people collecting support do not have steady monthly pay. They don’t collect in good months, and do in bad months, because you can’t pay for groceries with average annual pay.
If you are searching for people who are breaking the rules about what benefits they receive, this is actually not a bad place to start. Out of the estimates I’ve seen, it’ll sift out about 80% of the chaff.
But what’s left over is still mostly chaff. Anyone who actually knows facts about support payments can tell you - people cheating the system are rare, because welfare payments are already too small and too difficult to arrange for people who genuinely need them. There are easier ways to scam money. Welfare is a hard and low-reward target for a scammer. This scheme only made sense if you ignore the facts on the ground.
Guilty until proven innocent
Once you were identified by Robodebt, the burden of proof rested with you to prove you had been entitled to those payments. That’s bad enough.
When I was young and didn’t have steady work or much money, I didn’t bother keeping detailed records, every pay stub, etc. And lot of the places I found work were struggling businesses that were closed a year or so after I left. Proving I was entitled to any support payments would’ve been difficult.
Additionally, Australians (and Australian employers) are advised to keep records for seven years. Robodebt went after many people whose payments happened a dozen years before. Nobody had records to clear their name.
Humans are gone, computer says no
Robodebt was all about squeezing poor people while using minimal staff costs. Disputing a Robodebt notice had people sitting on hold for literally hours, day after day. The stress of this has a body count.
So I’d guess these are some of the things to look for in the UK in the months ahead, assuming this isn’t an empty announcement but an actual threat. I wish you good luck and fierce determination.
The draft definition, which will need to be signed off by the cabinet later this week, currently includes three strands, according to government sources familiar with the plans.
It would define extremism as the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on intolerance, hatred or violence that aims to undermine the rights or freedoms of others.
The shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, said the party would recruit 8,500 more mental health workers and promised that the sickness benefits bill would fall under Labour.
I could go on about this subject for years, but mental health in the NHS needs tens of billions of pounds of ringfenced funding before Labour could seriously think about this. All this gives us is “Shut up, take the pills and get back to work!”
From the archives (and the start of my vocal hatred of Blairism):
When I swore that I would never vote for Tories, I was talking about policies, not parties or people. Labour Tories are bastards too. I never voted for Blair and his party in a general election either.
Too many lines have been crossed. There is more chance of me spoiling my vote than picking someone now. Fuck them all.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I don’t want to speculate too wildly, but the coordinated discrediting of Corbyn and the rapid replacement of him with Starmer smells COINTELPRO as fuck.
Not everything is a disinformation campaign by the Tories.
Oswald Mosley was a Labour MP before he founded the British Union of Fascists. Robert Kilroy-Silk was another former Labour MP who moved to far right politics after a successful television career being abusive to muslims and trans people as a tabloid talk show host. There has always been that chud section of the Labour party, never being obvious but always having an out group to target, Roma and other travellers being a perennial favourite and trans people being the current target.
I have been saying that Keir Starmer is right wing for years now. I gave him a chance, and had low expectations that he failed to meet. I’d prefer 2010 David Cameron to come back as prime minister than Starmer, and I’d rather have almost anything but 2010 David Cameron coming back. Starmer is not comparable to Joe Biden, I would put Biden well to the left of Starmer.
It is no surprise that the only current member of the Shadow cabinet who I like is the one who Starmer can’t get rid of, deputy leader Angela Rayner.
Oh, and just to finish this off, my Labour MP is a TER. Anyone trying “Vote Labour no matter who” on me is likely to get a mouthful of abuse to their face. Labour have a year at most to prove that they have turned their back on transphobia, if they can’t do that then they can fuck off.
