IIRC, since privatisation the total amount of water company debt is roughly equivalent to the total amount paid out in shareholder dividends in the same timeframe

Yeah probably. Most ‘big’ accounts aren’t on Mastodon anyway though, they’re on Threads.

One obvious reason the author doesn't explore is that neither Wales nor Scotland has ever experienced mass immigration nor profound demographic changes in their population.

Scotland remains 92.87% white (2022), Wales 94.2% (2021), compared to England at 81% (2021).

In Scotland, 2.2% identity as Muslim, 0.4% as Hindu, 0.1% as Jewish.

In England, 6.7% identify as Muslim, 1.8% as Hindu, 0.5% as Jewish.

Scotland and Wales are therefore much more homogenous as populations. They're whiter, less religious, and from similar backgrounds. They're not as diverse as England is and therefore don't have the challenges of community cohesion and social solidarity that England does.

It therefore doesn’t have the levels of intra- and inter-communal diversity which can provoke the kinds of tensions we've seen playing out in the streets of England over recent years, whether in Hindutva-Muslim ethnoreligious violence in Leicester or these anti-Islam and racist riots in recent weeks.

Scotland's sense of its national identity has also not been challenged to the same extent as in England. Nor has a patriotic attitude towards Scottishness been derided as hateful, bigoted or xenophobic, as it has in England. (This sometimes leads to highly funny events, though, like when ScotNats try to claim they were victims of the British Empire.)

I mean, they're pretty much about to go under - do they even have the £104m to pay?

And frankly if they did participate good for them for laying their lives and livelihoods on the line to try to do whatever possible to help liberate the subjects of genocide.

Yeah that's gonna be both a block and a report. I see enough antisemitism on a daily basis without dealing with this shit.

It's the result of the UN's own internal investigation into UNRWA. The full statement by Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, is available on UNRWA's website.

https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/investigation-completed-allegations-unrwa-staff-participation-7-october

They've already fired the nine UNRWA staff members involved.

Squeeze 'em til the pips squeak.

Yay. Photon is by far the best imo

Also strongly recommend Photon users change the theme to Catppuccin, it's such a lovely colour scheme

I think bundling the two together obscures more than it illuminates. I don’t think it’s any less serious (in fact in some regards it’s more dangerous), just that it doesn’t fit with normal far-right characteristics. To take one important difference, the far-right are ultra-nationalists, while Islamic fundamentalists are strictly anti-nationalist – they don’t recognise the legitimacy of nation-states to exist at all. They also tend to be pretty unconcerned with race or ethnicity in themselves, whereas that’s obviously a major thing for Neo-Nazis and other Fascists. And it makes it harder to identify and address the problem, because the sources and drivers of far-right extremism are separate and often unrelated to the sources of Islamic fundamentalism and radicalisation.

Plenty of people are scared of the two assasinations of MPs by right wing lunatics.

One of them was a far-right lunatic, but the man who assassinated David Amess was a London-born radicalised Muslim affiliated with ISIL

I haven’t tested out my opinion that ‘Church is good, actually’ to see how that one goes down here but I’m not expecting the result to be positive.

Bunch of thugs. I hope the law comes down on them like a ton of bricks. This is the absolute last thing the community needed after such an appalling slaughter.

But my worry is that in the usual (and justified) condemnation of these bastards we’re going to miss the wood for the trees.

There are real and profound divisions and tensions in this country. This is a manifestation of that. We’ve got real problems of Islamist and Far-Right radicals that we appear to just be completely ignoring and doing nothing to prevent. We’ve got pressure groups like The Muslim Vote who are engaging in sectarian Islamist politics on the one hand while Reform and even darker forces are developing in response, which is why these thugs turned up outside a Mosque – fake news spread on Twitter about the identity of the man who stabbed those kids. British Jews are terrified and wondering whether they have any future in this country. We've got riots and brawls breaking out in cities like Leicester between people of Indian and Pakistani descent, the sectarian politics of India, Hindutva and Pakistan played out in Britain.

We’ve got major problems of community cohesion and our approach to multiculturalism, insofar as we have one, clearly isn’t working.

I hope Labour will begin to address this… Communal solidarity is so crucial to this country