> The Forde report, an independent inquiry into Labour’s culture that was published in July 2022, found that the party was an “unwelcoming place for people of colour” and had a “toxic” culture of factional disputes between the party’s right and left. > > In March 2023, Mr Forde gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he said that no one from Labour had been willing to discuss the recommendations further and highlighted concerns raised by ethnic minority politicians within Labour about racism in the party. > > In response, it has now emerged that the Labour Party sent Mr Forde a robust legal letter, seen by The Independent, accusing him of acting against the party’s interests and advising him that it was “considering all of its options”. > > Lawyers accused Mr Forde of having made “extensive negative and highly prejudicial comments” and questioned his professional conduct. > > Speaking to The Independent this week, the respected barrister said: “I don’t know if it was an attempt to silence me. I mean, they’ve couched it carefully along the lines of ‘We’re reminding you of your professional duties,’ which I found mildly irritating because I am a regulatory lawyer, and I don’t like my professionalism or ethics being questioned ... but I felt it was more. > > He continued: “I’m a private individual; they can’t silence me. I fundamentally object to people saying to me, ‘You don’t know how to behave as a professional.’ I’m afraid that Black professionals get it all the time.”

> This week, in yet another setback to Rishi Sunak‘s efforts to showcase how the Conservatives have created – over a decade and a half – a robust economy, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that monthly growth in April in the UK had flatlined. > > The British economy was said to be struggling with a faltering retail sector, a decline in manufacturing, and a reduction in construction output, after a 0.4% rise in March. The City’s pundits appeared to blame the weather and not the cost-of-living crisis for the lack of growth. The consequences of Brexit, as it seems to be so increasingly, was absent from the finger-pointing. > > But this news of the parlous state of the British economy comes amidst more of the same. The UK’s labour productivity had increased by just 0.4% annually over the 12 years following the financial crisis – half the average growth rate seen in the 25 wealthiest OECD countries – and has resulted in a cumulative loss of £10,700 in wage growth for the average worker’s annual salary. > > Middle-income individuals in the UK are now 20% poorer than their counterparts in Germany and 9% worse off than those in France. > > […] [T]he UK’s parlous goods exports would be far worse if you did not include the UK’s ‘empty calorie’ trading of global gold. If you took out such high frequency precious metals trading, it would mean that the UK’s goods exports are down some £44 billion since 2018. And that the UK’s goods exports are down, the UK’s service exports are up. > > […] The one silver lining in this dire economic news is that service exports are buoying up the UK economy. Indeed, last year the UK ranked second in the world for such exports – including ICT (Information and communication technology), education, culture, and finance. > > The leading nation the UK exports such services to is the United States, where the $129.7 billion of services provided equates to over a quarter of the UK’s entire service export economy (27.6%). > […] > The Lawyer has noted a 41% year on year increase in revenue by the top 50 US law firms in Britain since 2018: a jump from $5.7bn to $8.1bn. Even factoring in inflation, the rise is 13%. According to The Lawyer in 2021, the top American law firm in the UK was Kirkland & Ellis, and whilst their UK company house listings might not capture all of their UK earnings, it shows a 70% declared rise in profits last year. > […] > Last month, it was reported that another American law firm, Quinn Emanuel, was offering its newly qualified lawyers in London an eye-watering £180,000 a year, an 18% hike from the year before. Those five years out of qualification will see salaries of £290,000. […] To put this all into context, the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, earns £160,976. And the London Living Wage is currently set at £13.15 or, roughly, £27,352 a year. > […] > The income per person in the UK’s richest local authority – Kensington and Chelsea (£52,500) – now stands at 4.5 times that of the poorest – Nottingham (£11,700). > […] > Last year, hundreds of homeless families were permanently displaced from London by local councils, with little notice, or choice. The escalating rents in the capital, which have surpassed the local housing allowance (LHA) – the amount private tenants on housing benefits are entitled to for rent, varying by local authority – have driven these forced relocations. > > The campaign group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL) reported in 2023 that 319 households accepted private tenancies outside London. These families were frequently given 24-hour ultimatums by council officials to accept homes outside the capital or risk being classified as “intentionally homeless” for refusing the offer.

Archive/No Paywall

> A Labour manifesto that brings the railways into public ownership, strengthens workers’ rights and removes tax exemptions for private schools (all policies from 2017 and 2019 manifestos) should be universally welcomed. > > But what lies beneath is far more sinister. The 2024 Labour manifesto bakes in austerity for our public services. By ruling out redistributive taxation, it de facto accepts existing spending plans that the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says mean cuts to unprotected departments of between 1.9 per cent and 3.5 per cent per year. Austerity baked in. > […] > The IFS has said there is a “conspiracy of silence” between the two major parties about the scale of cuts that is baked into the current economic plans. The Resolution Foundation estimates that implies upwards of £19bn of cuts in non-protected departments. > > Nothing in Labour’s manifesto changes that analysis. The tax changes Labour has announced (mostly reforming non-dom status and removing tax breaks for private schools) amount to around £7bn in extra revenue – and that has already been earmarked […] > > Across the public sector, from nursing to care workers, from teachers to junior doctors, there is a recruitment and retention crisis. Unless you restore public sector pay, you will not solve those staffing shortages, or tackle the NHS backlogs. It’s also not clear from the manifesto where any additional funding would come from to fund the private sector operations that shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has promised, leaving the worrying conclusion that they may come out of existing NHS budgets. > > […] Both councils and universities need an injection of cash, or we will all lose out. The courts have massive backlogs and child poverty has risen to 4.3 million due to decades of benefit cuts – none of which are being reversed by Labour’s new manifesto. > […] > But as Labour has become ever more reliant on wealthy and corporate donors, so it seems their tax policy has been diluted. He who pays the piper calls the tune. > > If you want a snappy summary of Keir Starmer’s “changed Labour Party”, it was pithily provided by Kay Burley earlier this year: “Labour’s happy to cap child benefit, but not bankers’ bonuses”.

Edit: Finally completed! Sorry it took so long, there was a memory leak I was confusing for the upgrade.

As mentioned here, we need to upgrade Pict-rs to 0.5 for Lemmy 0.19.4 (well we don't strictly need to for 0.19.4, but this is something we have to do eventually). I don't have a reference for how long this will take, but it'll probably be a few hours.

Some downtime on Lemmy will happen as there's some changes to our deployment I want to make, but I'm going to try to keep the instance up while Pict-rs is doing its thing. If it eats too much RAM/CPU though, I may take Lemmy down. Join the Matrix room to stay updated.

Today marks the one year anniversary of our humble little instance. It's been an eventful year but, despite fate's best efforts, we're still here. So go us! (or boo us if you think we suck)

> When Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, stood in the pouring rain last week to announce a general election, there could hardly have been a less auspicious beginning to the Conservative Party’s campaign. In the space of a few days, it has gone downhill from there. > > Eighty-five Tory MPs have shown their confidence in their party’s ability to win another term by declaring their retirement. These include the former PM Theresa May, long-serving minister Michael Gove, and erstwhile Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom. Twenty-two of these MPs have served in the Commons for fewer than ten years, and ten of them were only elected in 2019. > […] > They are right to be worried. What is happening to the Tories is the culmination of the long-term decline and decomposition of their vote, which was accelerated by Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Truss debacle, and Sunak’s time in office. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, during the 2010s, the party became increasingly dependent on a coalition of propertied interests, with its core mass base provided by elderly voters. > > These layers of the electorate were shielded from the direct consequences of the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government through protection of pensioners’ incomes via the “triple lock” — a guarantee the state pension would rise in tandem with average earnings, inflation, or a baseline figure of 2.5 percent (whichever is the highest). > > Deft manoeuvring around the “need” for cuts and judicious scapegoating helped ensure the Tories then escaped the political consequences of systematic cuts to public services, especially the National Health Service, that this demographic cohort depends on. But there was more to this loyalty than the consequences of Tory policy from 2010 onward. > > First of all, there is the social location of being a pensioner. Because the incomes of pensioners tend to be fixed and cannot be made good in an emergency by reentering employment, their experience is analogous to that of the petty bourgeoisie. As many Marxists have observed, dependence on one’s own modest capital and ability to labo[u]r produces a political disposition toward stability and a hostility to real and imagined threats. > […] > The second factor, which you might call the “strong force,” comes from [pensioner's] tendency to acquire property over time. […] This has had two significant political consequences. For the elderly property owner, it has strengthened the tendency to right-wing, authoritarian politics that was already latent in the social location of pensioners. In contrast, for younger people — today’s under-fifties — the housing shortage has severed the link between aging and the propensity to vote for the Right which, in the British case, means the Conservatives. > […] > Sunak’s election campaign is the last gasp of a historically exhausted party. The task of trying to turn the situation around by appealing to working-age people is difficult, because his own political outlook (and that of the Tories in general) seeks to undercut any demands made on the state. > > Steps to addressing the housing shortage would cut against the interest that the existing Tory coalition has in keeping property values high and maintaining the private rental sector. A move away from a politics of scapegoating would deprive the Tories of a tried-and-tested method of binding their supporters together. > > As a result of Johnson’s stupidity, Truss’s recklessness, and Sunak’s do-nothing attitude, the age at which someone is more likely to vote Tory has more than doubled since 2019, from thirty-nine to seventy. To prevent complete disintegration at this hour, all the Tories can do is double down and hope there will be a viable enough rump left from which to fight back after the election. Even such a limited measure of success could well prove to be out of their reach.

> Video footage shows Jon Benjamin sitting in the front seat of a car and directing the weapon towards a person sitting in the back in what appears to be a joke. > > Laughter and music can be heard in the background as the employee makes a hand gesture suggesting they’re uncomfortable. > > At the time of the incident, sometime earlier this year, Mr Benjamin was on an official trip to two Mexican states where there is a high presence of drug cartels, the Financial Times reports. > […] > The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has not officially announced that Mr Benjamin was removed from his position. > > However, the government’s official website states that he ‘was UK Ambassador to Mexico between 2021 and 2024’.