flamingos

A Reform UK election candidate standing in the postponed North Northants Council (NNC) election for Higham Ferrers could trigger an immediate by-election if he wins the seat after he moved to China.

Alan Beswick had been on the ballot paper as one of the two Reform UK candidates for the May 1 elections but, due to the death of Liberal Democrat John Ratcliffe just before polling day, the election in the two-seat Higham Ferrers ward was postponed until June 12.

Names of four nominated Reform candidates were submitted to NNC’s election team. A party spokesman says Mr Beswick’s circumstances changed but they were unable to remove his nomination.

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Bluesky

Labour has called on Nigel Farage to take action after an image emerged from a Reform local election stunt depicting female cabinet ministers as cows in an abattoir.

The roadside setup in Hertsmere, Hertfordshire, shows deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, chancellor Rachel Reeves and education secretary Bridget Phillipson depicted as cows waiting to be slaughtered.

The stunt, pictured by a passerby and passed to The Independent, was damned as “dehumanising” and “misogynistic”. Reform local election stunt depicting leading female cabinet ministers as cows in an abattoir.
[…]
Reform did not initially answer questions on the issue, but responding to The Independent at a press conference in London, Mr Farage said: “All sorts of appalling things get said and done by people fighting in elections, at local and national level, and we get it done to us.

“If one or two of our people do it to them, maybe they think it’s funny. It probably isn’t very funny.

“I can’t pretend we’re perfect. What I can tell you is that one of the ways in which we have professionalised this party is to put people through a vetting process. And I think we’ve come up with a slate of elected councillors and mayors and a new MP that we can genuinely be very proud of.

“If there is the odd lapse in taste, then I regret it, but it’s kind of called politics.”

Good day all, in response to the increase in transphobia we've experience since the For Women Scotland v Scotland Supreme Court decision, seemingly a mix of genuine malice and people tripping up with a topic they're unfamiliar with, I've taken the initiative to write some guidelines on how to engage in the topic and clearing up some common misconceptions.

https://guide.feddit.uk/politics/transphobia.html

I'm not all that happy with them, I want something more comprehensive but my time has been pretty taxed lately and I don't want my perfectionism to stand in the way of having these out. If there's any issues, glaring omissions or whatnot, then please let me know or make a pull request here.

Context

Archive

Keir Starmer is at odds with his powerful chief of staff over whether to scrap a two-child cap on benefits, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, a costly policy move that the British prime minister is under pressure to make after bruising local election results.

Starmer favors lifting the limit as a way to demonstrate the ruling Labour Party’s commitment to alleviating child poverty, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal government matters. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, however, has been one of the main opponents of the move, contesting the estimated £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) expense ahead of the government’s most recent fiscal statement in March.
[…]
Starmer has faced repeated calls from Labour lawmakers to reverse the cap, which currently limits child benefit payments to two children per household. Rather than heed pressure to change the policy immediately upon entering government in July, the government delayed a decision by announcing a consultation on a broader child poverty strategy. McSweeney urged Starmer at that time to rule out scrapping the two-child cap, according to people familiar with the matter. He argued that polling shows that Labour voters view the cap as fair, the people said. Starmer pushed back and removing the cap has remained an option under consideration by the government.

Starmer, Chancellor of Exchequer Rachel Reeves and Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall proposed scrapping the cap in the March statement, according to the people, before concluding there wasn’t enough money to fund it. McSweeney was again opposed to the idea, the people said.

The Downing Street official said any suggestion that McSweeney had blocked a worked-up plan supported by three ministers would not be true.
[…]
Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown added to the pressure on Starmer on Wednesday, saying that scrapping the cap was “the cost-effective way of getting more children out of poverty” in an interview with ITV. He separately told Sky News that Reeves could raise £3 billion by either increasing taxes on the gambling industry or reducing the interest paid to commercial banks for their deposits held by the Bank of England.

One government figure in favor of the scrapping the cap countered McSweeney’s polling argument by pointing out that most Labour voters also don’t want child poverty to go up. Lifting the cap is the most financially efficient way of doing that, the person said.

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

Police have been issued guidance on how to search women’s homes for abortion drugs and check their phones for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss.

New guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) on “child death investigation” advises officers to search for “drugs that can terminate pregnancy” in cases involving stillbirths. The NPCC, which sets strategic direction for policing across the country UK, also suggests a woman’s digital devices could be seized to help investigators “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy”. That could include checking a woman’s internet searches, messages to friends and family, and health apps, “such as menstrual cycle and fertility trackers”, it states.

Details are also provided for how police could bypass legal requirements for a court order to obtain medical records about a woman’s abortion from NHS providers.

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