On Saturday, I received a letter from the DWP telling my partner about changes to Winter Fuel Payment.

My partner died on Thursday 19th September. I informed the DWP of his death on Friday 27th September using the online "Tell Us Once" service. 1/ My partner's state pension has already been stopped. I did not understand why they were writing to him about WFP, since clearly they knew he was dead. 2/

This is idiotic. The hostages are in Gaza. Israel controls all movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza, and its military campaign creates serious risks for NGO staff. Clearly Israel must consent to allow Red Cross staff into Gaza and make it safe for them to do so. This is idiotic too. The reason the BBC (and other news organisations) preface "Gaza health ministry" with "Hamas-run" is to issue a content warning on the information provided by the health ministry, not to validate Hamas.

I am reminded of them every time I enter @RochesterCathed and see the shadows of the paintings that were hacked off the walls, plastered over or whitewashed, and the banner in the Quire listing the Bishops of Rochester that starts with John Fisher and ends with Nicholas Ridley.

https://twitter.com/EFernie/status/1831234779464818897

John Fisher was executed by Henry VIII for refusing to recognise him as head of the Church in England and opposing his marriage to Anne Boleyn. He is a Saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

There can be no private sector solution to the crisis engulfing water companies that does not involve very large increases in customer bills. Nationalise them. These companies provide a finite resource to a restricted population. Their revenue comes almost entirely from customer payments. The idea that shareholders can have high returns AND customers low bills necessarily means inadequate investment and/or unsustainable debt.

Blimey. And you thought Thames Water was complicated. This is Southern Water. Topco (Greensands Holdings Ltd) is registered in Jersey. That strange arrangement at the bottom of the chart is a Whole Business Securitisation similar to that in Thames Water. And as with Thames Water, there is external debt in the parasitical extractive structure built on top of the regulated utility.

I watched the BBC Storyville documentary about Yosef Weitz again last night. Interesting detail I missed the first time: clip of an Israeli academic saying that Ben-Gurion commissioned an academic research paper to "prove" that Palestinians chose to leave in 1948... 1/ ... he emphasised that Ben-Gurion didn't want genuine academic research to find out the reasons why Palestinians left, he wanted an academic paper to support his story that Palestinians freely chose to leave and were not driven out by the IDF. Astonishing. /2

I read their amicus brief and can summarise it thus:

"We talked to our friends in the IDF and they told us the charges were unfounded".

https://twitter.com/kevinjonheller/status/1820776047169704234

The same group produced a report on the 2014 Gaza war. embassies.gov.il/MFA/FOREIGNPOL…

Distressing to see a leading legal commentator make statements about the ICJ's advisory opinion that are simply untrue. The ICJ did not ignore Israel's security needs, as @JoshuaRozenberg claims. It said they did not override the Palestinian's right to self-determination. 1/ In paragraph 233, the Court said:

"The Court considers that, in cases of foreign occupation such as the present case, the right of self-determination constitutes a peremptory norm of international law." 2/

Israel has been told many times by legal authorities that it doesn't have a right of self-defence in the occupied Palestinian territories, and yet it still persists in claiming this right, and Western leaders - some of whom should know better - tamely agree. Israel's belligerent actions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not self-defence, they are violations of its legal obligations as an occupying power. The solution to its perceived need for security is to end the occupation, not to brutalise the occupied population.

This "dividend" is not a payment to external shareholders, it is a cash transfer to Thames Water's private equity parent, Kemble Finance. In private equity such transfers are usually structured as debt service. I'm not sure why the Kemble-TW relationship relies on equity.

https://twitter.com/BladeoftheS/status/1810683568668221611

Kemble Finance is wholly reliant on the cash transfers from TW to service its debts. Without them it would collapse into insolvency, forcing at the very least a distressed sale of TW. I suspect the regulator thinks this is not in the best interests of TW's customers.

@richardathome @Opinion_Lassie @JohnWest_JAWS @BBCNews @Channel4News @BylineTimes The vetting company is real. is its trading name, hence the dormant company (it protects the brand name). The company itself is Sphinx Technology Ltd.
Website:
Companies House: Vetting.com
sphinxtechnology.co.uk
…te.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/132048… @richardathome @Opinion_Lassie @JohnWest_JAWS @BBCNews @Channel4News @BylineTimes Companies House records show that Sphinx Technology Ltd was incorporated in February 2021 and Colin Bloom was appointed as director in March 2021.

Dear @reformparty_Uk, you say you want to get "up to 2 million" economically inactive people "back to work", and you think this will save £15 billion in benefit payments. Here's a reality check... 1/ As of December 2023, 5.44 million women aged 16-64 were economically inactive. That's about a quarter of all women in this age group.
3.84 million men were economically active, about 18% of that age group.

2/researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06…

They don't mean Bank of England debt, they mean the UK Gilts purchased by the BoE in return for new bank reserves during the various rounds of QE. The Bank of England has been selling these gilts off to drain excess reserves - what is known as "QT". Reform proposes to end QT. 1/

https://twitter.com/maitlis/status/1802458727292793093

As far as I can tell, Reform proposes to refinance gilts held by the Bank of England as zero-coupon 75-year bonds, which the Bank would have to hold to maturity. This would prevent the Bank draining any more of the excess bank reserves from the system. 2/

Sorry to throw a bucket of cold water over this, but economic inactivity is at almost the lowest level in history and far below what it was in 2010 when the Tories came to power. The small rise since Feb 2020 is largely explained by population ageing. coppolacomment.com/2024/06/the-my…

https://twitter.com/fletcherr/status/1799333640457122119

Here's the long view of the UK's inactivity rate. The tiny blip at the RH side is the rise since the pandemic.

More on that structural shift in the UK economy since the financial crisis. The quality of the labour force has been increasing, and that has compensated for both MFP failure and lack of capital deepening. 1/

But more highly educated workers doing more hours does not equate to more highly skilled jobs. We need to know what jobs they are doing. Stagnation of productivity and poor wage growth suggests that many are not doing jobs commensurate with their skill level. 2/

Farage's target of zero net migration relies on the idea that there is a large pool of low-skilled British workers ready and willing to be deployed into crucial sectors to replace immigrants. But there is no such pool. The UK is at full employment and has been for some years. 1/ The Tories have for 14 years tried to generate growth by forcing lots of people to do lots of work. This has been at the expense of innovation and capital investment. (chart from @CPSThinkTank using ONS statistics). 2/

Since I spent yesterday singing The Dream of Gerontius, I think I'll write a post about demons. We are expected to fear the demons, to feel relieved when they are safely "caged within their bars" like "beasts of prey". The good Angel tells us the hate they express has no reason, it is merely "the restless panting of their being".

Correlation is not causation, exhibit of the day. "Migrants are not to blame for the UK's inadequate fixed capital investment, but let's cap migration instead of increasing fixed capital investment"

I have only skim read this so far. Will give considered thoughts in a post in a few days. But my immediate reaction is that it is ascribing cause to what may be merely effects.

https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1788174001224794379

For example, high immigration and ethnic diversity in London compared to regions could be due to agglomeration effects. Agglomeration effects put pressure on housing and public services, but is impeding agglomeration really the best solution?

I have been doing a spot of research into LBC's owner Global Media and Entertainment Ltd. Did you know that it has made a loss every year since 2008 except for 2018? It borrows shedloads of money from its offshore parent, at exorbitant rates of interest, and pays out enormous sums to that parent in debt service.

"Trump is considering a 10 percent universal import tariff, the former administration officials said, and one result of that policy could be to make the dollar weaker relative to other currencies."

Dear oh dear. Someone needs to brush up on Lerner's symmetry theorem.

https://twitter.com/GavinBade/status/1779859622586696188

Increasing tariffs on imports strengthens the currency!