Peter Black

The Guardian reports that Labour Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell has accused Reform UK of destabilising British democracy by spreading divisive material that is being amplified by bots and troll farms.

In an echo of an essay by Oliver Bullough on Byline Times, which I blogged on earlier this month, the paper says that Lucy Powell has called for tighter laws on social media giants to tackle misinformation, arguing the online space was “open to wealthy individuals, and bad state actors”:

She also highlighted the multimillion-pound donations that have bolstered Reform’s election war chest and “fund their powerful online campaigns”.

Arguing Nigel Farage and his party posed a threat to democracy, she said the law should be strengthened to “tackle the scourge of dis- and misinformation which is ripping communities apart and undermining us all”.

She said Reform’s “exploitation of online algorithms on social media sites is well documented”, as was the way the party had benefited from “bots and troll farms to amplify support”.

The need to deal with this problem is getting more and more urgent.

If you were to go into Swansea City Centre today, you would find that a large part of it is fenced off while building work carries on there. This is Castle Square, an open space in front of the city's historic castle that is undergoing its second transformation after a major revamp in the 1990s saw it mostly concreted over.

The square itself has evolved from a medieval Norman settlement to a bustling Victorian commercial hub, and finally into a central civic space. After being flattened during the 1941 Blitz, the site was transformed into public gardens as illustrated above, and then redesigned into a hard-scaped urban amphitheater in the 1990s as pictured below.
The area's history is closely tied to the adjacent medieval fortifications and the changing face of the city centre set out in this AI summary:

1. Medieval Origins and Commerce

• Norman Stronghold: In the early 12th century, Norman lord Henry de Beaumont built a timber castle on a strategic bluff overlooking the River Tawe. The area that is now Castle Square sat just outside the main castle, hosting a settlement of Anglo-Norman craftsmen.

• Stone Fortifications: The timber castle was attacked multiple times by Welsh forces and eventually rebuilt in stone. By the 13th and 14th centuries, the castle was enlarged, bringing the Castle Square site within the extended outer defensive walls.

• Early Trade: Long before it became a square, the plot featured burgage plots where medieval merchants traded.

2. The Victorian Era

• Thriving Retail: By the 1800s, Castle Square and the surrounding streets were the commercial heart of Swansea. It was home to grand Victorian and Edwardian buildings, including the famous Ben Evans department store.

3. The Blitz and Post-War Gardens (1941–1990s)

• The Swansea Blitz: During the tragic "Three Nights Blitz" of February 1941, German bombers devastated much of central Swansea. The buildings in Castle Square, including the Ben Evans store, were completely destroyed.

• Castle Gardens: In the post-war reconstruction, the Swansea Council decided against rebuilding on the site and instead designated it as a memorial to the victims of the bombings. In 1953, Castle Gardens opened with ornamental flowerbeds, pathways, and a fountain, serving as a picturesque public green space right in the city center.

4. Modern Transformations (1993–Present)

• Urban Amphitheater: Over the decades, Castle Gardens became a bit scruffy and fell into disrepair. In October 1993, the council decided to replace the greenery with a harder, treeless urban space. This redesigned "Castle Square" was completed in 1995 and featured a focal glass-and-steel leaf sculpture.

Prior to the latest reconstruction work, the square contained six historical plaques based on drawings by local schoolchildren. They commemorate key moments in the city's past, including Welsh attacks on the castle, Dylan Thomas at the nearby Three Lamps, and the devastating "Three Nights Blitz. 

Labels: lochist

The Times reports that government borrowing was £60 billion higher than the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted in recent forecasts, as the spending watchdog also admitted to underestimating the hit to growth from Rachel Reeves’s payroll tax raid.

The paper says that in its latest evaluation report on the accuracy of its economic forecasts, the OBR admitted to understating the scale of annual government borrowing by more than £60 billion in its March 2023 and March 2024 budget projections.

The OBR said that persistently higher than expected inflation and interest rates, both of which pushed up debt interest and welfare spending beyond what was anticipated, were partly to blame for the inaccuracies:

Lingering inflationary effects from the surge in global energy prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were more pronounced than the OBR thought.

The economic forecaster said yesterday that it had “adjusted our analytical and modelling toolkit” to ensure this did not happen again in the wake of the US-Israeli war with Iran, indicating that Reeves, the chancellor, could be handed a sobering set of forecasts at the autumn budget if the conflict drags on.

The OBR said that the substantial rise in government spending Reeves announced in her first budget in October 2024 also pushed borrowing far beyond its previous projections.

In that budget, Reeves set out a huge increase in daily government spending and public investment expenditure of around £70 billion. The package was funded through a mixture of extra borrowing and tax increases, including a £25 billion rise in employer national insurance contributions (NICs).

In March 2023 the OBR predicted that borrowing would total £85 billion in 2024/25, £66 billion lower than the actual figure, and in March 2024 it predicted borrowing would reach £87 billion in the same year, £65 billion below the actual result.

Reeves’s decision to increase employer NICs is likely to have constrained the economy by much more than the OBR calculated when the policy was announced nearly two years ago. The UK economy expanded by 1.4 per cent in 2025, well below the OBR’s prediction of 2 per cent, which it admitted had been “too optimistic”.

“In broad terms, this could be because our pre-measures forecast was too optimistic, our assessment of policy effects was too optimistic, or some combination of the two,” the forecaster said.

Economists have blamed the NICs rise for pushing up unemployment in the UK by making it costlier to hire people, especially the young: the jobless rate among this group has hit an 11-year high of 16.2 per cent.

It is not as if the government were not warned. Back in early 2025, the Centre for Policy Studies predicted that the year ahead would be the most expensive on record for businesses who employ workers on the minimum wage, with the combined amount of tax paid by employees and employers for those on minimum wage being the equivalent of a shocking 21.3% of salary in 2025:

Since the minimum wage was introduced in 1999, the tax wedge has fluctuated. In 2010, it stood at 18% but the Coalition government reduced this to 11% in 2015, primarily by increasing the income tax personal allowance. Although this increased over time, owing to wages rising faster than the personal allowance thresholds, by 2024 the amount of tax paid per minimum wage worker stood at 17.5% of the salary – still lower than in 2010.

However, the rise in employer’s National Insurance in the Budget and the dramatic reduction in the threshold at which it is paid mean that 21.3% of the cost of employing a full-time worker on the minimum wage will go in tax. Coupled with increases to the minimum wage, it will cost businesses £2,367 more to employ a full-time worker on the minimum wage than it did in 2024, which will have an obvious impact on hiring decisions for the lowest paid.

For higher wage positions, the increased cost of hiring workers translates into lower wages over time. For those on the minimum wage, where salaries cannot fall, businesses will instead hire fewer workers, which limits the opportunities for those in low-paid work and the unemployed who are looking to get back into the workforce.

The choice made by the Chancellor to use employer's national insurance payments to fund public sector payment has had a direct impact on government debt and unemployment, hitting the lowest paid and young people hardest.

The Guardian reports that graduates saddled with ballooning student loan debts have told MPs that they feel they are being unfairly used as “cash cows” to finance measures benefiting older people such as the state pension triple lock.

The paper says that student representatives have told an official inquiry about the “harrowing” plight of many young people, while the man who led the 2019 government review into post-18 education criticised the “almost sneaky” changes to loan terms, and appeared to compare the situation facing graduates with the car finance and payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandals:

Pressure has been building on the government in recent months to reform the student loans system, with campaigners and politicians queueing up to describe the rules as unfair.

The debate has focused on the millions of students from England and Wales who have taken out a “plan 2” loan. Many have money taken from their wages each month to repay their debt, but what they pay off is often dwarfed by the interest that is being added every month, so the sums they owe get bigger.

The catalyst for the latest row was Rachel Reeves’s decision to freeze the salary threshold for plan 2 loan repayments for three years. This threshold, above which graduates have to repay 9% of anything they earn, will now stay frozen at £29,385 until 2030. The above-inflation interest rates that apply to many loans have also come under fire.

As part of its own inquiry into student loans and the taxation of graduates, the Commons Treasury select committee took evidence from seven experts on Tuesday, including Ollie Gardner, the founder of Rethink Repayment, a graduate-led campaign for a “fairer” system, who described the current situation as “an intergenerational crisis”.

He gave the example of a 33-year-old NHS doctor who was about to be a consultant who had already had £38,000 of interest added to their student loan and was expecting to have to repay between two and two-and-a-half times the amount they originally borrowed.

He added: “To see Rachel Reeves or previous governments freezing the thresholds makes it feel a lot like we’re being used as cash cows.”

Gardner said figures showed that by 2030, the triple lock – which guarantees that the UK state pension will rise by whichever of three figures is the highest – was going to cost the government £15bn a year. He added: “To see graduates being the mechanism to generate more tax revenue … I think lots of people feel very, very angry about that.”

This is a system that desperately needs reform, let's hope that the inquiry has some workable recommendations.

This article was published on Liberal Democrat Voice on Sunday

Listening to David Miliband at the Hay Literary Festival a few days ago, two things that he said struck me as interesting.

The first was that the Labour government had been elected to effect change, but they have not changed enough. The second related to the high number of young people who have left school with no education, employment or training opportunity. Where is the triple lock for that cohort, he asked.

Of course, both of these statements are easy soundbites, needing much more policy detail and commitment before any government can make a difference, but if, as is the case, people are disillusioned with Starmer’s administration, and are casting around for an alternative, then why have the Liberal Democrats not stepped into the breach?

Just over a week ago from the time of writing this, Harrogate MP, Tom Gordon, posed the question on Liberal Democrat Voice of what his, and my party, should stand for.

He pulled out three examples from the King’s Speech, where the Lib Dems could adopt a distinctive position. These were a full ban on conversion therapy, with no exceptions, Leasehold Reform and opposition to digital ID.

My purpose is writing this is not to disagree with Tom’s analysis but to seek to extend it to a fuller list of how the Liberal Democrats can promote a radical and bold programme for change that will make people sit up and listen, a broader canvass if you like.

My list is not comprehensive and there will be items that others will want to add or take away from it, but if we are to use the opportunities that present themselves to grow our party then we need a narrative that will capture people’s imagination.

Above all, we need an engaged leadership who are prepared to embrace an agenda for change in a serious and compelling way, without the stunts and gimmicks that have lost us support in the past.

None of these suggestions are new, it’s just that the party has appeared too timid to fight for them in the past.

Europe is a Liberal Democrat issue and yet we seem too embarrassed to campaign openly for party policy. Opinion polls show that there is a majority who believe that Brexit has been a disaster and that we need to get closer to the EU.

I accept that full membership of the EU is not an option at present, but why aren’t we saying loudly and often that we need to rejoin the EU customs union to reduce red tape, get rid of tariffs on trade with our biggest export market and to provide the protection for key industries such as steel? The boost to GDP will also help to fund everything else we need to do to get this country back on its feet.

Donald Trump’s attitude to Russia, his war in the Middle East and his willingness to cast aside traditional alliances, make it imperative that we move closer to Europe, to protect our borders and to collaborate on defence, new technology and a whole range of other issues. We cannot do that without jettisoning Brexit.

Social Care and health – Is it me or have we gone quiet on the need for a massive investment in social care to relieve the pressure on the health service? This should be at the centre of our campaigning, along with calls for capital investment in the buildings and equipment that house these services.

Climate Change is the other big issue facing us and in particular energy policy. Rising temperatures, predicted to be 40C by 2052, mean that we need to have strategies to preserve food and water supplies. The party should be pushing for all homes to be heavily insulated and linked to solar panels to reduce energy costs and consumption and provide some refuge from hot weather. A huge investment in alternative energy is imperative for security, the environment and affordability and, if we are serious about moving away from the combustion engine, then we need electric car chargers in every street.

Young People – Alan Milburn’s review tells us that there are over one million 16-24-year-olds not in education, employment or training in the UK. This is not an issue that should be left to the Labour Party. We should be calling for better educational opportunities, supporting companies to provide more apprenticeships and better access to vocational training – a triple lock that could create the skilled workers we need to rebuild our infrastructure, to construct the public sector social homes we need to reduce homelessness, and provide the staff needed for the health service.

Higher Education – this leads on to the state of our higher education institutions, many of which are in debt, laying off staff and cutting courses. Why aren’t we calling for changes to the visa regime that has precipitated this crisis and looking at how we can make this sector more sustainable?

Social Media and Child Protection – whatever your views on Jess Phillips, her resignation letter raised some serious issues about protecting children on-line. This strikes me as a cause we should be promoting. Outlawing serialised images of children on-line and restricting access for the under-18s should be a no-brainer.

Housing – a commitment to a massive increase in social housing to reduce homelessness in my view should be the very minimum we can do on this issue. In addition, there is no doubt that leasehold tenure, like rent charges, has had its day, can be exploitative and expensive. We should be campaigning to abolish it. And don’t get me started on shared ownership leases, a supposed form of affordable home, in which the tenant pays rent, a service charge and a mortgage. Government should prevent public sector bodies using this format straight away.

Immigration – in many ways the elephant in the room. However, as Liberal Democrats we have always recognised the many benefits migrants bring to our society and our economy. Net migration has dropped significantly in recent years but there is still work to do in reducing backlogs on asylum claims, looking at whether we can allow asylum seekers to work and re-opening legitimate pathways for asylum to reduce channel crossings. We should be much more vocal on this issue.

Defence – contrary to current government thinking, renewing our commitment to the UN target of spending 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid actually helps in making our country more secure. But, yes, we need to increase the amount we spend on conventional defence in the light of increasing international threats, build alliances across Europe, including joint operations and command, and invest in building up our capacity to resist cyber and drone attacks.

Liberty – the party needs to be more vocal in defending the European Convention on Human Rights and continue our resistance to digital ID as both a waste of money and a threat to our freedoms.

Finance – finally, how do we pay for all this? These measures cannot all be carried out at once, but better alignment with Europe can increase GDP, while making the tax system fairer, with a wealth tax, reform of council tax and other measures can bring in new income.

These are just some of my thoughts on how the Liberal Democrats can lay out a distinctive agenda in a five- or six-party system in which our support appears to be stagnating and where we are failing to cut through in many parts of the country.

Others will have different priorities, but what seems clear to me is that a change of approach is needed. We have to be louder and bolder in standing up for liberal principles and values. Maintaining our present course is not an option.

There is an interesting article on Byline Times in which Oliver Bullough, who has written a number of books about the way oligarchs and corrupt state players exploit the UK's financial system to launder and hide money, argues that we must act now to prevent a complete oligarch takeover of British politics.

Bullough says that when you step back and look at Nigel Farage’s £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, even when you compare it to illegal donations, you can see that there has never been anything like it in British politics, and people are right therefore to be more than usually concerned about where it came from, why it was given, and how it was spent.

He says that all the parties’ spending in the last British general election added together comes to barely one-hundred-thousandth of the total for America’s presidential and congressional races that year.

Bullough suggests that some US billionaires might be looking across the Atlantic right now and wondering why they should bother chucking so much money at SuperPACs when they could, for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas, buy a whole G7 country, money that wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems:

I know there are lots of crises clamouring for your attention right now, but the threat posed by electoral funding should trump them all because without negating it, there is no way to solve the others. Without a fair political system, we cannot elect politicians who will represent everyone, rather than just their donors; without adequate enforcement of the laws, there is nothing to stop politicians from cheating their way to victory and, once they’ve won, retrospectively approving their own triumph.

If we don’t get big money out of democracy therefore, there will eventually be no democracy. Once a political system has started to accept the kind of money that flows into American elections, there is precious little you can do about it. If a democracy has become a plutocracy, it is well on its way to oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t give up their power without a fight.

The government has made some moves in this direction, but its efforts are inadequate and lack the urgency required. They must be strengthened, and then the rules must be robustly enforced by ambitious, independent and powerful investigative agencies.

The first threat is from money. Billionaires are accustomed to getting their way, and are highly skilled at obscuring their wealth behind shell companies, foundations, associations, and other structures, and spreading it among multiple jurisdictions, in order to do so. But these time-honoured ways of escaping detection are a clunky old video store compared to the streaming service smorgasbord that is provided by digital currencies that can be programmed to evade detection.

It is good that the government has announced a moratorium on any donations made in cryptocurrencies, and tightened restrictions on how money can flow via companies, but that’s not enough. Only people can vote in elections, so only people should be able to fund them; and those people need to be taxpayers in the UK, on the electoral register.

This radical but simple reform would sweep away every available loophole, and every trick, and force political donors to be open and transparent about who they are, what they’re doing, and where their money comes from.

Political donations should be made, in sterling, from a British bank account (with the sole exception, for obvious reasons, of Northern Ireland), to make sure their origins are checked as thoroughly as can be. And there should be restrictions on how much any one person can give: £100,000 seems like a good limit to me, but I don’t mind as long as it’s comfortably in the low six figures. In recent elections, British parties have become increasingly dependent on large donors to fund their operations, which is a trend we need to reverse, if we want a healthy democracy. These rules should apply not just to the period before an election, but all the time.

The second threat is from cheats. Too often in the UK, parliament has passed strict rules to protect us – against sewage in our rivers; against money laundering on our high streets; or against bias on our airwaves – but those rules have not been enforced. Regulatory bodies are underfunded, demoralised, and lack the political support they need to do the jobs they’ve been given. This legalisation by under-enforcement needs to stop.

In 2022, Boris Johnson’s Government stripped the Electoral Commission of its powers to prosecute wrong-doers and undermined its independence by forcing it to follow a government-imposed strategy, with many Conservatives at the time angry that the commission had fined Vote Leave for breaking funding limits during the Brexit referendum.

But the lesson to draw from that episode was that the commission had too few powers, not too many: what’s the point of fining a political party or campaign after it’s already won? The obvious lesson that politicians drew from such a futile punishment was to cheat. The body defending our democracy needs to be able to act quickly, decisively and robustly to keep corruption out of politics, and to make sure our politicians serve only the interests of their constituents.

Once more the government is guilty of not doing enough to protect our precious democracy. It is time to put that right.

The Independent reports on warnings by a leading think tank that the UK is facing a "democratic emergency”, after new polling revealed around 16.5 million UK adults saw political deepfakes in the month before the local elections.

The paper says the poll found that almost one in three (30 per cent) voters said they had seen a deepfake or AI-generated video, audio clip or image about an election candidate or politician online in the lead-up to this month's elections:

The polling of 2,005 adults was conducted by Opinium for the cross-party think tank Demos between 30 April and 6 May this year – immediately before local and devolved elections across the UK.

The warning comes just two weeks before voters go to the polls in Makerfield for a contest that could decide Britain’s next prime minister if Andy Burnham wins the seat and decides to challenge Sir Keir Starmer, which he is widely expected to do.

Deepfakes are digitally created and altered content, often in the form of fake images, videos and audio recordings.

Around one in six people (16 per cent) said they had encountered political deepfakes more than five times during that period, suggesting that a significant minority of users are being exposed to this content at very high levels.

The polling showed that, when it comes to UK politicians, Labour and Reform leaders were most often reported to have been “deepfaked” - which is significant for the upcoming Makerfield by-election as the race is expected to be a close fight between those two parties.

The findings come as the Electoral Commission launches a new deepfake detection pilot intended to improve identification and map the scale of the problem. However, findings from the pilot are not expected for at least six months.

Demos has called for the government to "move faster to establish clear rules and accountability” for deepfakes, urging ministers to "use the Representation of the People Bill – which is already underway – to introduce meaningful protections for the public before the next general election”.

The think tank previously proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Bill to address AI-generated election misinformation, including clearer legal responsibilities for platforms and developers – proposals which were not taken up by the government.

Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, agreed that "stronger safeguards are needed to protect voters from online misinformation”.

She told The Independent: "Reports of growing numbers of political deepfakes ahead of elections is deeply alarming, and it's clear that stronger safeguards are needed to protect voters from online misinformation.

"My committee has repeatedly raised the risks posed by AI-generated deepfakes with the big tech companies, and we weren't satisfied with their response. It's clear that protections are not working as intended.

"Deepfakes can do untold damage to individual lives and to the integrity of our democratic systems, eroding confidence In the electoral process itself. At a time where hostile actors like the Kremlin are actively working to undermine our democracy, complacency isn't an option.”

Demos's research also found that 39 per cent of respondents were unsure whether they had seen a deepfake at all, which the think tank argued showed a "concerning lack of public confidence in discerning the truth in visual content they see online related to elections”.

More of the public said they were not confident they could identify a deepfake (43 per cent) than said they were confident (38 per cent), the survey also showed.

The most commonly identified subjects of political deepfakes were Donald Trump - with 45 per cent of people saying they had seen a deepfake of him - Sir Keir (36 per cent) and Nigel Farage (27 per cent). Meanwhile, a smaller minority reported seeing deepfakes of Zack Polanski (10 per cent) and Kemi Badenoch (8 per cent).

Polling suggested much of the content was overtly damaging to the profiles of those represented. Among respondents who had seen political deepfakes, six in 10 (56 per cent) said the content portrayed the subject negatively, including 28 per cent who described the content as “very negative”. The polling also found significant public concern about the impact of AI misinformation on democracy, as 42 per cent said they were worried about fake videos or deepfakes of candidates and MPs having an impact on the 7 May local and devolved elections, while just 23 per cent said they were not worried.

Azzurra Moores, associate director of information ecosystems at Demos, told The Independent: “Political deepfakes are no longer a future threat, they are already flooding people’s social media feeds.

“Our polling shows millions of people say they are now encountering AI-generated political content online, often repeatedly and usually in a negative context. At the same time, many voters are unsure how to discern the truth from the content they are seeing.

“That combination of widespread exposure and low public confidence in spotting deepfakes creates serious risks for trust in democratic debate, setting the stage for a democratic emergency in the UK.

This is something that may require further legislation, if so the government needs to move fast.

The BBC reports that First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth has promised to tackle congestion along the M4 motorway and said it needs a "roads-based solution".

They say that the Plaid Cymru leader has classed the Brynglas Tunnels in Newport as an "economic problem for Wales", which is most probably true, but so is the M4 around Port Talbot, but as most of the journalists live in the south east of Wales, it doesn't get the same attention.

Of course, ap Iorwerth did not commit to a specific scheme to address the traffic black spot, which is not surprising as the cost of the black route across the Gwent Levels is astronomical.

Of course, Welsh Labour have accused the First Minister of making an "unfunded transport promise", while Reform UK and the Welsh Conservatives are calling for the relief road to be built:

Plaid had been opposed to a proposed M4 relief road, a controversial project to build a new motorway across the Gwent levels south of Newport, when the former Labour government last ditched the scheme.

The road, also known as the black route, would have bypassed the Brynglas Tunnels, which struggle to cope with the volume of traffic the M4 attracts at peak times.

Old proposals for a relief road included colour-coded black, blue, red and purple routes, with the yellow line marking the railway

Speaking at the Urdd Eisteddfod on Anglesey on Wednesday, ap Iorwerth said it had been Plaid policy for "many, many years" that something needed to be done to "unclog that Brynglas bottleneck".

"We remain against that black route as it was called, which was unnecessary," he said, adding that a "road-based solution" was still needed alongside new railway stations proposed between Cardiff and the Severn Tunnel.

Ap Iorwerth said options could include the so-called blue route, which would involve upgrading an existing dual carriageway through the south of Newport.

"What we need to do is do the work, and we will, to find the solutions," he said.

The question of course is whether the blue route is even viable. I had a briefing on this option when I was an Assembly Member and discovered that after spending a lot of money, it would actually make little difference to the congestion, offering some relief for a short time before filling up with traffic.

The fact is that whatever road the Welsh Government builds will be inundated with traffic very quickly, as happens with every similar project, not to mention the environmental damage.

It was Robin Cook who announced that Chicken Tikka Masala is the new national dish of Britain, but as David Olusoga told a session at the Hay Literary Festival the idea that the so-called previous favourite, fish and chips, is an exclusively British dish is misplaced.

As Wikipedia recounts Fish-and-chip shops first appeared in the UK in the 1860s, and by 1910 there were over 25,000 of them across the UK. This increased to over 35,000 by the 1930s, but eventually decreased to approximately 10,000 by 2009.

They add that the British government safeguarded the supply of fish and chips during the First World War and again in the Second World War. It was one of the few foods in the UK not subject to rationing during the wars, which further contributed to its popularity. However, the tradition did not originate here:

The British tradition of eating fish battered and fried in oil was introduced to the country by the Chuts and Spanish and Portuguese Jews who lived in the Netherlands before settling in the UK. These immigrants arrived as early as the 16th century, the main immigration to London being during the 1850s. They prepared fried fish in a manner similar to pescado frito, which is coated in flour then fried in oil.

Fish fried for Shabbat for dinner on Friday evenings could be eaten cold the following afternoon for shalosh seudot, palatable this way as liquid vegetable oil was used rather than a hard fat, such as butter. Charles Dickens mentions "fried fish warehouses" in Oliver Twist and in 1845 Alexis Soyer in his first edition of A Shilling Cookery for the People, gives a recipe for "fried fish, Jewish fashion", which is dipped in a batter mix of flour and water before frying However, "fish the Jews' way" in most English cookery books usually refer not to plain fried fish, but to escabeche, fish fried, then pickled in vinegar.

The location of the first fish and chip shop is unclear. The earliest known shops were opened in London during the 1860s by Eastern European Jewish immigrant Joseph Malin, and by John Lees in Mossley, Lancashire. Fried fish and chips had existed separately for at least 50 years prior to this, so the possibility that they had been combined at an earlier time cannot be ruled out. Fish and chips became a stock meal among the working class in England as a consequence of the rapid development of trawl fishing in the North Sea,[15] and the development of railways which connected the ports to major industrial cities during the second half of the 19th century, so that fresh fish could be rapidly transported to the cities.

Deep-fried chips (slices or pieces of potato) as a dish may have first appeared in England in about the same period: the Oxford English Dictionary notes as its earliest usage of "chips" in this sense the mention in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859): "husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil".

The modern fish-and-chip shop ("chippy" in modern British slang) originated in the UK, although outlets selling fried food occurred commonly throughout Europe. Early fish-and-chip shops had only very basic facilities. Usually these consisted principally of a large cauldron of cooking fat, heated by a coal fire. The fish-and-chip shop later evolved into a fairly standard format, with the food served, in paper wrappings, to queuing customers, over a counter in front of the fryers.

The point of this post is that we live in a multi-cultural society, but that is not a new development. Our country has a long history of migration over many centuries and our culture incorporates many traditions. The idea that the UK is somehow special and can exist in splendid isolation as portrayed by certain parties is nonsense.

Labels: lochist

The Independent reports that Labour has challenged Nigel Farage to disclose which authorities are investigating an alleged Russian hack linked to a £5 million gift he reportedly received.

The paper says that Anna Turley, Labour’s chairwoman, has written to the Clacton MP, urging him to publicly confirm whether he has reported the suspected cyber-attack to either the police or the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). She has said that if Farage fails to respond, then the Labour Party intends to make a report itself "in the public and national interest":

Farage received £5 million from Thailand-based crypto-entrepreneur Christopher Harborne in 2024, before he stood in the general election that year.

He has previously said the money was for non-political purposes, to pay for his safety and security, and later told The Sun it was a “reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years”.

A party source reportedly told the Mail On Sunday that forensic analysis of Mr Farage’s phone by “counter-espionage experts” indicated that “hostile state actors, almost certainly linked to Moscow, had used ‘spear phishing’ tactics to compromise his phone, email and bank accounts”.

Mr Farage told the newspaper: “These actions by Russia are deeply concerning and highlight the threat they pose to British security.”

Former NCSC boss Professor Ciaran Martin on Monday appeared to cast doubt over Mr Farage’s analysis, saying it was “without any merit”.

According to The Guardian newspaper, he said: “An aspiring prime minister has essentially claimed that Russia has launched an unprecedentedly aggressive intervention – a malicious intervention – in British politics, and he’s not produced a shred of evidence to support that claim.”

Ms Turley said she was “very concerned to read” that Mr Farage was allegedly hacked.

“If your suspicions are correct, this would constitute a serious cybercrime and a potential hostile-state operation directed at the leader of a British political party,” she told the party leader.

“I note that public reporting does not appear to confirm that this matter has been reported either to the police or to the National Cyber Security Centre.

“Instead, the reports state that you privately commissioned analysis from unnamed ‘counter-espionage experts’, who concluded that ‘hostile state actors, almost certainly linked to Moscow, had used spear phishing tactics’ to compromise your phone email and bank accounts.

“Quite apart from the implications for you personally, the alleged crime is an incredibly serious one with potential wider implications for Britain’s national security, the integrity of our politics and public confidence in our democratic system.”

As serious as a possible hack is, in many ways it detracts from the main issue - the funding of a UK politician and his political party by an overseas businessman to the tune of millions of pounds and the failure by Farage to report the £5m gift to the Parliamentary authorities.

The more Farage changes or adds to the story behind this gift, the less credible it seems. We need to establish the facts.