Yes. A direct cause of the Post Office scandal was that the law was changed so that courts must assume computer output is correct. The Law Commission misunderstood an expert who argued the opposite. The MPs passing the law joked that their kids would have more chance of understanding it. 😡
Reformed more or less as in the Articles of Religion (there's one line I'd quibble with): www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-w...
Statues and rituals are covered in Articles XXII and XXXIV.
Seems we can follow @rebeccabexchapman.bsky.social or read Michael Hayden's daily reports at areformedcatholic.substack.com
It's stopped on X as well.
TIL that this account covers surrenders as well as sinkings.
Probably because there haven't been a lot of surrenders in RN history....
Today's @yougov.co.uk Daily Poll asks whether immigration is rising or falling. The provisional, unweighted responses show people think it's rising, just as you say. The final weighted results will be interesting.
This is Home Office brain, regardless of the party on power. They see everything in their responsibility as a form of crime that is resolved by tougher laws (even if they're never enforced). The UK has long needed a migration or integration department like Australia.
The value of the tithes that funded the clergy. Except that most of those would go to the rector (who might be an abbey, lay landowner, etc.), rather than to the vicar who had the spiritual responsibilities. £12 is worth about £9,500 today, though many parishioners would have lived on much less.
You could have said the same about the early Marxists or the early liberals in their coffeehouses or the Bloomsbury set. They went on to change the world. I'm not promising Blue Labour will, but it often takes a generation for big ideas to gain mass support.
Surely the government isn't revisiting voter ID because it's trying to focus on a limited number of core missions, not get distracted into a battle on Tory territory. It would be easier to repeat voter ID as part of an electoral reform package including compulsory attendance.
This might interest @mouseinthecourt.co.uk who lives this daily.
It's so awful you have to put up with these Muppets, Mr Katwala. Thank you for your patience and continuing to offer insight here.
But you don't have to do any maths beyond "1, 2, 3". The returning officer does it all for you! You just put who you like in order.
It's like when you get directions on Google Maps, etc., you just put in the place you want to go and they do the maths to get you there. Except with voting.
Note that Victory Day is the Russians term for VE Day. Russia's soft power at the highest levels of the US government is absurdly high.
It can be explained even more simply as: vote for the candidates/parties in order of how much you like them: 1, 2, 3, etc. The returning officer (chief vote counter) will do some maths to make sure your vote is used as effectively as possible and never wasted.
I only discovered that my first digital camera had optical zoom after several months of wondering why all my pictures were so blurry. I also accidentally put it into Sepia Mode for a few weeks at a party. Though not as bad as the friend who dropped her camera into the hotpot at that same party.... 🤦
Does that mean they are likely to go to the Constitutional Court seeking a ban?
The Lib Dems and Reform need to pay more attention. Merkel's Law (after a coalition, "the little party always gets crushed") won yet another election.
You're correct they the context but they doesn't change the fact that both companies are making poor choices. They could have shared the brand (common in Japan) or chosen a new once that wasn't the 'fake plastic trees' version of an old one.
Ah, sorry, that's clearer. Normally the answer is the property, but IIRC Smith's sold that off long ago and it's all leased now. So I agree that they have got a tough challenge on their hands.
They have bought the struggling High Street shops (that have to compete with Amazon), not the profitable ones in airports and railway stations (which have local monopolies, so even Smiths' management can't mess it up).
Remember they would no longer be paying Council Tax or Stamp Duty. So instead of making a big payment up front, the same tax would be spread over their lifetimes. That's great for young people struggling to buy their own home!
That would be another better-than-nothing solution, I agree. But it would discourage people from moving house, which further messes up the housing market, which is already abysmal. And it means local government would be messed up for another half-century. They're going bust right now....
It's not depriving any offspring of even a single penny they own. And it's not like taxing pensions you paid into because the widow didn't pay anything personally to increase the value! If Cornwall is trendy, that's just a free gift to her. You should not be rewarded more for luck than work.
Except that currently tenants are generally paying Council Tax anyway. So it will be added to rent, but they'll lose liability for an entire, regressive tax. OP calculates 75% will be better off and that sounds plausible.
Rates *alone* are not a solution to high house prices and OP didn't claims that, did they? But 3 aspects of this plan might help somewhat: (a) stamp duty abolition, (b) revaluation & (c) removal of the Council Tax cap. NI hasn't tried (a) permanently, doesn't need (b) & hasn't tried (c).
If she has a massive family home, then she can pay the tax through an equity release scheme. Anyone who's listened to Classic FM for an hour knows they are common. There could even be a publicly-run scheme for grannies who can't/don't want to buy one from the market.
Listen to Classic FM for an hour and you will discover that there are lots of equity release schemes targeting exactly people like that, who have become rich through a free gift from the property market. Cornish widows would be able to pay the tax that way.
That is one of the great advantages of the plan. Currently England uses 1991 values, which introduces massive distortions.
Lots of jurisdictions, including Northern Ireland, manage it. And neither the assessor nor the owner really needs to fight over every last £ and parking space, so you could create an appeal structure that requires a certain minimum difference from the assessed value.
