Matthew Smith

Hampshire is a big place. What part?

Disabled woman put in nursing home against her will says she feels 'betrayed' Lucinda Ritchie, who has full mental capacity, was transferred from a hospital bed despite her refusal.

West Sussex: 33-year-old disabled woman Lucinda Ritchie moved to nursing home against her will, wheelchair turned off, forces hospital readmission: www.bbc.co.uk/news/a... #disability #EDS

No, I've got work in the morning so I'll have to sleep through it and read the result in the morning.

An easy way to tell if someone is a posh Poujade or really has the working class's interest at heart is whether they mention the term "working class" without 'white' either side.

2010: Looking back in anger There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be very…

I wrote a piece at the weekend about why I think Labour lost both the 2010 and 2015 elections. Basically I think Tony Blair lost them before either leader took up their post. www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/mt.php/...

Probably they couldn’t make out the lyrics.

The company secretary of my old boarding school was a Doreen Brunning. (At the time I thought she was just the secretary, but she was a director.) Wonder if they were related.

Apparently Refuk have pledged to ban 'inflammatory' conversions of churches into mosques. First, all the converted buildings were disused and second, the only people inflaming anything is them.

The odd thing is that he's not talking about white EU migrants from the Blair years but more about British descendants of Asian Commonwealth immigrants who were always British citizens. It's like he's forgotten about that, when it was a big factor in Brexit.

A past that we know was never real Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth elected on a Reform UK slate in 2024 who subsequently went independent because his views on immigration were too extreme even for Nigel Farage, has now formed…

Recently at Indigo Jo Blogs -- A past that we know was never real (filleting Restore Britain's nostalgic propaganda video):

Recent blog post, about recriminations from the 2010 general election.

My brother in law is a Palace fan and he told me a lot of fans don't like Selhurst Park and would like to move to Crystal Palace stadium. But it would cut the link with Croydon as the stadium is in Bromley borough (historically Kent rather than Surrey).

Bit like all the "safety complaints" about the new passenger trains in Florida, where a number of pedestrian fatalities have happened. "If only there were some way of knowing which way the train will go" was one comment.

1997? If he thinks we were hunky dory after 18 years of Tory government, why doesn't he just become a Tory? And red squirrels and RT buses weren't common in 1997.

The one down the end of my old street was run by Chinese. I knew a Moroccan who ran a Moroccan restaurant in Notting Hill, then moved to Southend to open a fish & chip shop.

2010: Looking back in anger There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be very…

New post at Indigo Jo Blogs -- 2010: Looking back in anger (why you can't blame the Guardian for Labour's loss).

I twigged when he offered me compensation (which I didn't expect as it was only a one-day delay) and expected me to install some obscure money transfer app. I knew RM wouldn't use that kind of app.
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Scam Alert:

If you tweet Royal Mail about a parcel that's got held up or some other service issue, you'll get a dozen replies and quotes from fake customer service accounts. Ignore and block them all; they're scammers. #ScamAlert
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@lubottom.bsky.social thought of you when I saw this.

Mould and condensation will never come into a home if you own 1 natural item If you are worried about mould there is a very cheap method to keep it away that does not involve chemical products or doing any cleaning at all.

Don't know how accurate or useful this is, but I found this piece about house plants that absorb moisture (from, eg., clothes hung to dry indoors) and help fight mould.

Except when it's about sticking the boot into Pakistanis.

We don’t all know each other Rupert Lowe The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which…

Recently at Indigo Jo Blogs - We don't all know each other (grooming gangs, the "rape gang inquiry" and a libel against British Muslims):

I was listening to Today on Radio 4 this morning. There was a segment about student loan interest in the UK. The presenter, after talking to former education minister David Willets, claimed that in 2010 the government was under pressure from voters to reduce state spending.
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First syllable rhymes with cow.

Voters care about how things affect them; this includes the tax burden, the cost of living, of food, clothing & fuel. If public money is being spent & benefits them, they won't complain.

A demand from the Westminster village was presented as common sense and public opinion.
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period; David Cameron's response was "he didn't even mention the deficit".

Do voters really care about those things? It was the Tories themselves who decided to slash and burn to pay back the debts incurred in the 2008 bank bail-out quickly. Their press cheered them on.
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This is pretty typical of the narrative about austerity that sprang up after the 2010 election. Austerity was a sensible policy; anyone who disputed it was silly and shouldn't be taken notice of.

I remember when Ed Miliband gave a conference speech towards the end of that
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I was listening to Today on Radio 4 this morning. There was a segment about student loan interest in the UK. The presenter, after talking to former education minister David Willets, claimed that in 2010 the government was under pressure from voters to reduce state spending.
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(Not disputing the real problems in some charities and NGOs, but there's nothing racist about recurrently criticising a persistently oppressive state.)
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Oxfam, Amnesty and other major charities are branded 'antisemitic' for the same reason the justice system is sometimes accused of being oppressive to men. More men get locked up because they commit more crimes; Israel gets HR criticism because it disregards human rights.
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