(1)Useful Guardian explanation of "quantitative easing/quantitative tightening" in Guardian: To stop UK PLC going bust after the financial crisis (& Covid) the Bank of England (on Threadneedle St) bought £895bn corporate bonds - ie lent £895bn to UK corporations... (2) Now they are slowly selling off the bonds , at an expected £100bn loss - in effect the Bank of England lent UK PLC £895bn to keep firms afloat, but is making £100bn loss on those loans , that the Treasury-the taxpayer - has to pay over 25 years. We bailed out....

(1) "why are Labour housing targets unlikely to make housing affordable " is quite straightforward. 1st , empirical observation: UK currently builds c200k houses / year, prices are rising. Labour target is 1.5m/ 5 years - it's only 100k more / year. Not really marker shifting (2) Housing market is mostly "2nd hand" , not new houses. But houses are an investment "asset" , they increase in value over time (unlike , eg cars). So you have to compare building numbers with "stock" of 25m houses. An extra 1m new houses isn't enough to shift 25m prices

(1) Compare and Contrast, this @Will___lloyd piece in the @NewStatesman on Labour Lobbying from this month is a real clone of my piece from 2023 : vs newstatesman.com/comment/2024/0…
tribunemag.co.uk/2023/12/labour… (2) On the left, me in Tribune, on the Right, Lloyd in the Statesman : Lloyd says Jim Murphy's Arden Strategies had 4 staff in 2021, now has 22, inv a "Clutch of ex-Scottish Labour Officials" - it looks like a straight lift from my piece that did this calculation originally....

(1) In 2004 "Jamies School Dinners" showed school dinners were terrible, turkey-twizzlers that made kids unhealthy and undermined education. The problem was cost cutting privatised catering. The answer was on-site publicly run kitchens engaging kids with food....... (2)...It was a big scandal that blindsided and embarrassed the New Labour Govt (even though Unison had produced loads of reports telling Labour MP's the same thing just before 1997) Everyone ran around issuing new standards, promising change, loads of press, but.......

(1)Amazon's documentary "The Fake Sheikh" on Tabloid Undercover Reporter Mazher Mahmood is well worth watching IMO. It shows a sickness at the heart of UK media, all its great investigative power (mis)used against...Page 3 Models, catwalk models and a pop star... (2)You have to fill in one blank yourself- the Tabloid hacks keep saying 'he was ready to expose the powerful' , when he only aims at 'The Well Known', and as these Celebs have done little wrong, resorts to entrapment + lies - it's the UK media ferociously savaging the innocent