-Amicae Carissimae-

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The widespread "No Kings" protests in the US today, objecting to (among many, many other things) the military parade for Trump's birthday, are happening on exactly the same day that our Actual King is attending... a military parade for his (official) birthday. :P

ETA: Americans, was that deliberate? The thought just occurred.

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Last night on BBC Question Time there was an exchange between Labour Cabinet minister Darren Jones and Reform's former chairman Zia Yusuf about migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. Jones started an answer with the words "the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women". Yusuf then claimed that "more than 90% of them are adult men".

As it happens, both were wrong. The UK government's own figures (section 1.1 there) show that "since January 2018, 71% of people detected arriving irregularly have been adult males aged 18 and over." Not all arrivals designated irregular are via small boats, but a large majority are; 86% is the figure given in the above-linked document.

But it's just such idiotically stupid politics by a government MP to insist on something that is so trivial to prove is wrong. Jones now looks as though he was either outright lying to the Question Time audience, which is unacceptable, or he wasn't in command of the facts on a subject that was near-certain to come up, which is incompetent.

And no, "Reform are full of racists" isn't remotely a good enough defence to this. It may very well be true, as Yusuf himself has quite possibly found in his own time in the party, but it still doesn't excuse a Cabinet minister baldly stating something that is utterly inaccurate, and that he should have known was utterly inaccurate.

It's a fundamental principle of politics, at least for me, that if you can't bring yourself to call out people on your own side of the fence, your comments cease to be debate and just become cheerleading. Jones should have done better.

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Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has died at the age of 82, and so today's music is chosen in his honour. I'm quite fond of the Beach Boys, so I had plenty of songs to choose from, but I've always really liked "God Only Knows" from the classic 1966 album Pet Sounds. Like the album it came from, the song did considerably better in the UK than in its native US. Over here it made it all the way to number two, kept off the top only by the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"/"Eleanor Rigby" double A-side. The video here is obviously much more recent, but it is an official one from the Beach Boys' own YouTube account, so I'm more than happy to embed it.

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130/365: Brass foundry office, Bewdley Museum
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Today started out rather damp, but things eventually improved and the evening was warm and sunny, which weather is supposed to continue into tomorrow. We'll see! As it's June, the sun didn't set until well after 9 pm, and given my latitude (about 52 °N) the sky never really gets fully dark overnight. It's no midnight sun, but you can see slightly more light if you look north in the early hours, which is always a mildly strange feeling! I did a bit of top-up food shopping today, having to go to three different shops to find chives which was very slightly annoying. It's not as if they're a herb that's highly obscure!

My photo for today has nothing to do with that, other than being in Bewdley. This is part of a re-creation of the old brass foundry, which operated here on and off from the late 1600s until the 1960s. The building is now part of the town's small but interesting (and free!) museum. In fact brass-making was revived here for a little while in the earlier years of the museum's operation, but eventually modern safety standards caught up with it to the extent that it couldn't be sufficiently modernised at a sensible cost or without losing its historic character. Since then the foundry has made use of exhibits like this, multimedia presentations, etc.

I do actually remember seeing brass being made here before the museum foundry had to shut up shop in 1996. As a child I was brought here by my parents (I grew up only a few miles away) and it was quite an exciting sight. Cramped, noisy and -- what I'm sure sealed its fate -- very, very dusty! We visitors had to enter by a different door to the workers, and we were kept several metres away behind a perspex screen. Given that molten brass has a melting point of about 950 °C, it was sensible to keep us away from the furnaces! Sadly I can't find a video of Bewdley brass-making in those days, which is a pity.

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Today's U-turn on Winter Fuel Allowance payments is arguably fairly reasonable in its intent, in that it means truly wealthy pensioners will not receive WFA but those on average incomes will. Put like that, it sounds fine, and in principle I can get behind it. The snag is... well, the several snags are:

1) The government has insisted, loudly, since last year that on no account would they do this, and that anyone suggesting they'd U-turn was not telling the truth. The "anyones" were telling the truth; the government wasn't.
2) Rachel Reeves has acquired a reputation as an extremely poor Chancellor who neither sticks by her commitments nor acknowledges U-turns. This will make that reputation even worse.
3) The new limit will be £35,000 a year, per person. But a couple on a combined income of £69,000 with no mortgage is much wealthier than the large majority of working people, especially those with children to support.
4) We're told that whether someone reaches the £35,000 mark will be decided via income tax returns. But most pensioners who have no other income don't do tax returns in the first place.
5) The change will cost £1.2 billion. Where's that coming from? Almost nobody believes Reeves' comment that the economy is suddenly doing sufficiently better to afford this.
6) There's already a strong sense that wealthier pensioners are uniquely shielded from cuts while everyone else suffers -- the triple lock is another example. This looks like strengthening that feeling.
7) If previously announced public spending, eg the extra money for public transport outside London, is cut again to pay for this then there will be absolute carnage in Labour's support in the regions.
8) The UK's demographics mean that the pensioner:worker ratio is becoming ever more tilted towards pensioners. If current trends continue, this change will become less affordable, not more.
9) One way of ameliorating this is by allowing more immigration -- but this is becoming politically toxic. England (specifically) is the most densely populated non-tiny country in Europe.
10) Nigel Farage, who pushed for this change, now has a clear win. Everyone knows that Reform's economics are far more fantastical than Labour's, but it doesn't seem to affect its polling.

Other than that, it's absolutely fine...

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127/365: Worcester Cathedral from Cathedral Square
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I was once again in Worcester to see friends today, but after I'd left that meetup I had a short time to do some shopping before my bus home. I took the opportunity for a photo, as you can see! This is Worcester Cathedral, taken from the first floor balcony in the Cathedral Square centre (a few restaurants and coffee shops, plus a hotel). I had several goes at getting a snap with all of the flags visible, but this was the closest I got! You can easily see the Ukrainian flag on the left, then the Union Flag. The third pole currently has a Pride flag, but that one refused to co-operate. On the top of the Cathedral tower is the English flag (St George's Cross). As you can probably tell from the sky, the weather was a tad iffy today, though fortunately the heavy rain held off until I was on the bus back!

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Wikipedia page including full result here. This by-election in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse constituency was for the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, and was caused by the death of the sitting SNP MSP Christina McKelvie in March. The by-election was held under the first past the post system used for Westminster elections, and the top four in the result were as follows:

Labour......... 8,559 (31.6%, -2.0 pts)
SNP............ 7,957 (29.4%, -16.8 pts)
Reform......... 7,088 (26.1%, new)
Conservative... 1,621 ( 6.0%, -11.5 pts)

The six other candidates were even more also-rans than the Tories, with none of them winning more than 2.6% of the vote. Turnout was 44.2%.

I wonder how many people saw this result coming? There'd even been a front-page interview in the Daily Record by the SNP's First Minister, John Swinney, which was predicated on the idea that this would be a straight SNP/Reform fight and "Labour can't win here". In the event, they could and they did. My own view, for what it's worth, was that the SNP would probably hang on with a reduced majority, with Reform and Labour in a close battle for second. I was wrong too.

From down here in England I'm obviously missing some context, such as how much of a personal vote McKelvie had, but a few things come to mind. First, the days of the SNP simply cruising to election victories are gone. They've been in power at Holyrood for a long time now, and Swinney just doesn't have the star power of Nicola Sturgeon. "It's all England's fault, vote for us and independence" is a rather unfair way of representing the SNP's pitch, but the heavy fall in the party's vote suggests they'll need a lot more than that. They may struggle to get close to a majority in Holyrood next year.

Labour will be delighted on the surface, and after all a win is a win. However, they lost vote share since last time (2021), and only won the seat because the SNP lost a lot more. Given that Labour is an opposition party in the Scottish Parliament, getting under a third of the vote is not some kind of overwhelming mandate. I suspect that a lot of anti-Reform and anti-SNP voters simply coalesced around Labour as the least worst option. In parts of this constituency unionism is still a strong factor, and Labour might have been seen as best placed there, too.

Reform has, inevitably, got the lion's share of media attention. This has been a bit silly in places -- as someone said elsewhere, the BBC in particular has been a bit "Labour won from the SNP, now let's talk to third-place winner Nigel Farage", which is something they do far too much. Nevertheless, going from zero to over a quarter of the vote isn't something anyone can ignore. I said a little while ago that Scottish (and Welsh) politicians should not be smug about Reform's victories in English local elections and imagine they were magically immune. This underlines that.

The Tories had a terrible night. I'm sure they expected that, but it was a fall from a respectable position four years ago. They clearly lost a lot of voters to Reform, but Reform didn't only win from the Conservatives. I suspect in fact they took some from Labour -- and even some from the SNP. Although the SNP is fairly unusual in modern Europe in being a liberal, left-wing nationalist party, not all its members are of that persuasion. It would be a mistake to assume that Reform's blend of social conservatism and left-wing economics didn't appeal to some SNP voters.

First Past the Post is a poor electoral system, but it's an even worse one now we have an extra major party in the mix. I suspect that in Westminster by-elections too, we will see more results like this in the coming years, with winners on barely (or even less than) 30% of the vote. The optimist in me hopes this will finally see us adopting a modern voting system, but the optimist in me has been repeatedly disappointed over the last decade or so.

I do have one final thought about Reform's popularity, both here and in Great Britain as a whole. These days, the main traditional parties go for an almost obsessively targeted, data-driven approach to canvassing, concentrating heavily on winnable floating voters or getting their base out. That means a lot of people never see a canvasser at election time. It's easy for those voters to feel the main parties don't care about their views. There's a clear space there for a party who'll "do things differently", and some evidence suggests many Reform voters usually don't vote at all. I think the traditional parties need to take some note of this. To a certain extent, their laser focus on a small subset of voters may be helping Reform...

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Long-time readers here will know that my views on AI (more accurately here, LLMs, which are only a subset of AI) are rather mixed. Unlike some people I don't think it's even necessarily desirable, let alone possible, for "AI to go away". However, neither am I an AI (okay, LLM) fanboy. Although the publicly available chatbots have improved noticeably in the last couple of years, they still have all sorts of issues -- hallucinations, repetitiveness, US bias, hectoring, etc etc.

Since yesterday was the 36th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre, I was curious to see how DeepSeek -- the Chinese chat bot most easily accessible to Western users -- would handle a question on the matter. The results were actually quite interesting, though not without serious problems and concerns. I'll share the entire conversation with you. I'd hoped to post it locally, under a cut, but DW simply refuses to co-operate and format it properly, so click on the link below to read. (No login or personal details required.)

"What happened on this day in 1989?"

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123/365: Hole Farm, just outside Bewdley
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This isn't the most interesting scene in and of itself, I know, but I chose to include it in my 365 series for a reason. This is the entrance to Hole Farm, just to the west of Bewdley. An unusual name for a farm, but although it's a tranquil place now it has a dark history. It's named after the nearby "Bloody Hole" valley, where Royalist troops were caught and massacred in 1651 after fleeing the Battle of Worcester. That battle was the final major engagement of the English Civil War (more accurately, of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms) and the Parliamentarians' victory led to the flight of the future Charles II and, eventually, Oliver Cromwell becoming Lord Protector of England. The "Bloody Hole" is rarely mentioned now, and I only found out about it myself a few years ago thanks to a small book of local history which I'd been reading for another reason.

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122/365: Kidderminster-Husum friendship boat
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No, not Das Boot the film! Since I started my 365 project on 1st February owing to my procrastination, I'm only now reaching the one-third mark on the journey. Today's photo is of the replica boat outside Kidderminster station, donated by Kiddy's twin town of Husum in far northern Germany. The boat was installed here last year, and it's added a very welcome splash of colour to the entrance to the station car park. Over the road in the background you can see Captain Cod's Fish Bar on the far left, and the Railway Bell pub with the white door. The road itself, Comberton Hill, is annoyingly steep if you walk up it from the town centre about half a mile away off to the left as you look at this photo.