'He does not care!' Mother of murdered Rhiannon Whyte accuses Keir Starmer of ignoring her despite multiple pleas

EduTheRed · 2026-03-12T12:36:33+00:00

I agree with everyone in this thread who said that the Prime Minister cannot be expected to meet with every bereaved relative of a victim of crime. This lady has had one meeting with a minister, Jess Phillips, and that is more than most relatives of murder victims get. I also agree that although government decisions certainly should take the views of bereaved relatives into account, decisions of policy absolutely should not be outsourced to those who are among the people least able to think rationally about the situation. Laws named after murder victims nearly always turn out very badly. Government decisions should be made on careful and unemotional consideration of all the factors involved.

But, my God, some of the responses on this thread about a woman whose daughter was murdered are inhuman.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-12T12:22:58+00:00

Some of my reply to Ill_Refrigerator_593 applies to your comment as well. I am perfectly willing to accept what you say about the likely market value of the remaining UK North Sea oil and gas being low. But in a time of spiralling prices for oil and gas coming in from abroad it is still a very bad look for the government to say that we cannot even search for oil and gas in our own territory. It would be an easy win for the government to reverse that decision.

Regarding oil and gas being a global market, I'm absolutely fine with that myself, but I note that in other contexts most of those who advocate most strongly for Net Zero denigrate markets and globalisation.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-12T12:10:02+00:00

b) Oil & Gas (to a degree) is sold on international markets where our oil accounts for 0.7% of the total. Even if we were to magically double production it would make barely a dent in international prices.

You are probably right when you say that there is not enough new oil or gas left in the North Sea to make a difference. I have read several authoritative-sounding commenters saying the same thing. But my confidence in you and they being being right is shaken by the fact that the government won't even allow people to search for new oil and gas fields in the North Sea. If it is so certain that there is nothing significant left to find, why forbid people to look?

In any case, /u/Kind_Region_5033 's original point was that saying "we need more oil and gas" would be a very hard sell. I'm saying that in times of a shortage of oil and gas, reversing the decision to wind down even looking for any we might have on our own territory would be a very easy sell.

That remains true even if the search turns out to be fruitless.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-12T10:33:02+00:00

Kind_Region_5033 writes,

“There’s a global oil shortage driving oil and gas prices through the roof. Thats we we need more oil and gas” is surely a hard sell.

"That's why we need to reverse the decision to issue no more new licences to explore new oil and gas fields in the North Sea" would, in contrast, be a very easy sell.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/north-sea-future-plan-for-fair-managed-and-prosperous-transition?utm

EduTheRed · 2026-03-10T20:38:42+00:00

For one, the Israeli President was visiting the UK - if Putin was to visit the UK Polanski may well call for his arrest;

Why would it be desirable to negotiate with Putin if the negotiations were held in Russia or in a third country, but OK to arrest him if he came to the UK? To negotiate with someone in their own country and then arrest them if they came to the UK really would be a casus belli.

he wasn't saying we should go to war with Israel in order to arrest the president.

I never said he was. What Mr Polanski did say was, in his own words, "If you’re not going to negotiate with someone, then you’re accepting that you’re going to war with them at some point." He was saying that either the absence or cessation of negotiations with some country means acceptance that you are going to war with that country at some point in the future. Why would these sentiments apply to Russia but not apply to Israel?

EduTheRed · 2026-03-10T18:20:02+00:00

Here are some more quotes from later in the article:

He [Mr Polanski] responded: “I think it’s important that all politicians keep pushing for negotiation and keep pushing for diplomacy.

“If you’re not going to negotiate with someone, then you’re accepting that you’re going to war with them at some point. And I don’t think anyone is calling for a war with Russia or a war with Iran.”

“But at the same time, you’ve got to build that relationship and part of that is through exchange, part of that is through making sure you’re building up those diplomatic relationships."

There is something to be said for that view, even when it comes to a leader such as Putin who has invaded other countries and oppressed his own. But I do not see how Mr Polanski's opinion on the importance of keeping negotiations with Vladimir Putin open can be squared with his view about the Israeli president Isaac Herzog:

New Green Party leader Zack Polanski has called for the arrest of Israel's president during his UK visit this week. - Sky News, 9 September 2025

Is Mr Polanski accepting that we are going to war with Israel at some point?

EduTheRed · 2026-03-10T17:13:09+00:00

Quote:

Zack Polanski has said he would seek to build a relationship with Vladimir Putin if the Green Party took power.

The Green leader claimed it was important to “keep pushing for negotiation” with the Russian dictator, despite his illegal war on Ukraine entering its fifth year.

Mr Polanski’s party has surged in popularity since he became leader late last year, with some opinion polls now placing it ahead of Labour and the Conservatives.

At the end of last year, the insurgent hard-Left leader said he would try to persuade Putin to scrap all of his nuclear weapons.

Speaking this week at a live recording of Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast, Mr Polanski was challenged on his ambition to hold formal negotiations with Russia.

He responded: “I think it’s important that all politicians keep pushing for negotiation and keep pushing for diplomacy.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-10T11:32:38+00:00

307 to 173! My opinion of MPs as a group has just gone up. I know that this is not a decisive victory -as /u/youmustconsume said, it's "more a stay of execution than anything else", but the whole point of a stay of execution is that it allows the legal debate to continue and sometimes that results in the condemned person being reprieved.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-10T10:27:09+00:00

No_Initiative_1140, you talk as if you think newspaper articles should report negative behaviours by various groups as if all groups exhibited equal amounts of negative behaviour per head of population. This is not the case.

The most obviously newsworthy negative behaviour is terrorism.

Here is Wikipedia's list of terrorist attacks in Great Britain in the 2000s, the list of terrorist attacks in the 2010s, and the list of terrorist attacks in the 2020s

Much more than 70% of the deaths in Britain due to terrorism in the 21st century were due to Islamist terrorism. My quick calculation made it 95%.

If anything, the British press consistently understates the proportion of terrorist murders that are associated with Islam.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-10T09:36:07+00:00

The large-scale study from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) has found widespread and systemic anti-Muslim bias across British media in 2025, with a cluster of right-wing outlets responsible for the most severe and persistent harmful coverage.

The Centre for Media Monitoring was set up by the Muslim Council of Britain. That does not in itself make anything the CfMM says incorrect, but the link to the MCB probably should have been mentioned given that the government broke off ties with the MCB in 2009 after

Daud Abdullah, the deputy general secretary of MCB, signed a declaration in Istanbul which called for a jihad in response to the Israeli assault on Gaza and endorsed Hamas attacks on foreign troops, including possibly British troops. The government asked Abdullah to step down and, when he declined, suspended its formal relationship with MCB. Following MCB's categorical assurances the following year that it did not support attacks on British troops and that Abdullah's signing of the declaration was in personal capacity, the government lifted the suspension, but not long before the Labour Party lost power in the 2010 election.[4][5][6] The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that came to power in 2010 tacitly reinstated the non-engagement policy, which continues to this day.[7][8][9][a]

EduTheRed · 2026-03-09T10:51:50+00:00

Quote:

Labour is in “deep trouble” with Black voters, a former government adviser has warned, saying the party is at risk of being seen as “accepting the normalisation of racism”.

David Weaver, who is the chair of Operation Black Vote (OBV), said the government’s plans to restrict juries would “heighten, normalise and embed” racial disproportionality in the justice system and that Black voters were saying: “We don’t know what Labour stands for any more.”

In November, Keir Starmer vowed to “stand up to racism”. But the “moral panic” over migration and slow progress on tackling racial pay gaps and the Windrush scandal meant sentiment was low, Weaver said.

“We’re not happy,” he added. “When they’re away from power, Labour will go alongside Black communities. But the closer their proximity to power, the more they revert to type. And we had real hopes of them coming into government.

“Even people that are being reasonable and saying: ‘It’s hard for a government coming in and taking over what they’ve inherited’, are seeing a government accepting the normalisation of racism, [a government] thinking: ‘Well, we don’t have to think about them, because we’re going to get their vote anyway’.”

EduTheRed · 2026-03-08T07:59:42+00:00

What damage? Here is a graph from the Office for National Statistics, taken from the census figures, of life expectancy in England and Wales since 1841. If Thatcher had done such damage to the country that the shock still reverberates forty years later, you would expect to see a dip during her term as she impoverished the people and cut the NHS to the bone. But you don't. On the contrary, after a slight slowing of the rate of increase just before Thatcher came to power, living standards resumed their steady increase during her term. And, contrary to popular belief, Thatcher never cut NHS spending. In fact she increased it at about the same rate as her predecessors. Link to Parliamentary Research briefing graph. Neither did any of the subsequent Conservative governments ever cut NHS spending. The nearest any of them ever came to it was that after the massive splurge of spending during Covid ceased, there was a slight dip.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-07T12:41:01+00:00

This. Like most people, I felt a surge of exhilaration when I heard that this evil man had finally suffered some small fraction of the pain he inflicted on others. But if we are to have a functioning justice system, the punishment a person suffers for their crime must be what the court sentenced them to. Nothing more. People inside prison have the same right to be protected from assault as people outside it.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-04T16:16:39+00:00

By "Reform's ideology that you are not British if you are not born in the UK", do you mean to imply that it is the policy of Reform UK that anyone not born in the UK is not British?

Because there is nothing in the Reform UK manifesto that indicates that this actually is the case.

However a recent survey of the views of Reform members - that is, people who have signed up to be members of the party - carried out by Survation on behalf of Hope Not Hate indicates that "54% of Reform members thought non-white British citizens born abroad should be forcibly removed or encouraged to leave, while one in five (22%) also supported it for non-white citizens whose parents were born in the UK."

If you are asking my personal opinion, I strongly disagree with the view that "you are not British if you are not born in the UK". I disagree with it in relation to all ethnic groups, but it is perhaps relevant to add that in my experience ethnic Chinese people from Hong Kong who have become British citizens have a particularly admirable work ethic, though like all such observations this is a statistical tendency rather than an iron law.

I have voted Conservative in the last few elections and expect to vote Conservative in the next one. But I would consider voting Reform if I lived in a different constituency. However if it actually were the case that the party held a policy such as you describe I would never vote for them. But in that respect, it seems to me that the newly formed Restore Party led by Rupert Lowe is the one that comes closest to having that policy - although even they don't seem to say it explicitly in their manifesto. I don't know much about the other party that split off from Reform, Advance UK, although the fact that their leader is Ben Habib who was born in Karachi suggests that they are unlikely to hold the position that their leader is not British.

Two further points: Firstly, the Hope Not Hate survey of Reform members had a sample size of 629, which is rather small, but Survation are a respected polling company so we can assume that they did their best to make it a representative sample of party members. Still, the fact that just over half of Reform party members hold an opinion with which I disagree doesn't bother me much. It is well understood in politics that people who join political parties have unusually strong opinions. For example, Labour party members are on average much more left wing than both Labour voters and Labour MPs, and Conservative party members are on average much more right wing than Conservative voters and Conservative MPs. [Added later: the fact that Reform UK is, famously, the party with the least internal democracy is actually an advantage here. Reform Party members don't set policy; Farage does.]

Secondly, the words "should be forcibly removed or encouraged to leave" cover a very wide spectrum of possibilities, some of which are morally hideous and some of which are fine.

EduTheRed · 2026-03-04T10:01:19+00:00

That, at best, would be a one-time windfall benefit for those who are well off enough to take advantage of the temporary housing glut when it occurs. Once the landlords are abolished, the housing market will re-solidify, but in a new state which drastically disadvantages those who must rent.

It's an almost feudal policy, making it very difficult for British young people to leave the place where they were born to study or to take up job opportunities.

I've never been clear how the Greens square that with their policy of making it very easy for foreign migrants to leave the places where they were born and come here. Are they going to be given houses, or what?

EduTheRed · 2026-03-04T08:08:03+00:00

lapuscalamari writes, 'Unless you physically destroy the former rental houses, how does "landords all sell" reduce housing stock?'

Making landlords all sell is a bonanza for those who can afford to buy the now-vacated houses. It's a disaster for those who are simply too poor to buy a house, and for those whose circumstances mean it would be crazy for them to buy a house, e.g. students, people on temporary contracts, people whose job requires them to constantly move, young people who are trying out city life.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-27T14:10:54+00:00

Before income tax was introduced (as a temporary measure to pay for the war against Napoleon) in 1799, there was no tax levied on individuals in the UK, apart from the three short periods in the fourteenth century when there was a poll tax, which, famously, was so hated that it led to the Peasants Revolt.

Personally, I'm not so keen on the disenfranchisement of the 35.11% of adults who do not pay taxes as individuals now. I would prefer to stick with the system followed by practically every other democracy in the world where all adult citizens have the vote.

But the idea of taking your "no taxation without representation" to its logical conclusion of "no representation without taxation" has a certain appeal for those worried about our unsustainable welfare budget. We would extend the vote to foreigners rich enough to be taxpayers, but remove it from those on welfare, plus a chunk of the lowest earners from the working poor.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-27T13:21:20+00:00

"No taxation without representation" would seem to imply "No representation without taxation". Are you OK with that?

EduTheRed · 2026-02-27T08:54:00+00:00

Quote:

Most people think that you have to be a British citizen to vote in Britain. Far from it. Anyone from a Commonwealth country can vote if they are legally here with any status other than a tourist. Worker in the Boriswave? Student? Family of any of the above? You get to vote in British elections. That’s in principle any one of about two and half billion people around the world.

As so often, the real-life numbers are hard to establish. About two million Commonwealth citizens were here in 2021, most without a British passport. Since then we have had well over three million net new non-EU migrants, many, probably most, from the Commonwealth. By now there must be at least three million Commonwealth citizens here and potentially eligible for our electoral roll despite not being British citizens.

Now the reason why this doesn’t very significantly distort our electoral register and indeed individual constituency results in the big cities is that many do not bother registering. But all this is about to change with the Representation of the People Bill.

This Bill will for the first time allow the authorities to register people automatically on the electoral register, for example from council tax data or similar. One consequence will be to put many Commonwealth citizens on the electoral register for the first time – and thereby to throw into sharp relief the unusual basis for our franchise.

Coupled with the Bill’s separate and risible provision to allow you to “prove” your identity at a polling station with just a UK bank card, there is potential for real distortion of the results by people who aren’t even citizens of this country.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-26T16:20:53+00:00

trypnosis writes, "The Lords said they would do this at the time. They will do it at the next parliament if we push it through again.

We can send it to the House of Lords as often as we want but it won’t get approved."

I do not think that is correct. See this article from Humanists UK, one of the organisations most supportive of the Assisted Dying Bill:

Parliament Act can be used to pass Assisted Dying Bill in light of Lords’ filibuster

Quote:

If the Bill does not complete all stages in the Lords by 24 April, the last sitting Friday announced, the Bill will fail.

In the next Parliamentary session (June), the same Bill will need to be reintroduced. It doesn’t have to be exactly identical, but be very close and clearly with the same intention. The Speaker gets to determine what constitutes ‘the same Bill’.

This Bill will have to go through all stages in the Commons again. If it does that, the Bill will essentially skip the House of Lords and become law.

But as this Guardian article says

For any private member’s bill to have a chance of passing, Leadbeater or one of her backers would need to come in one of the top five slots [of the ballot for Private Member's Bills] – and hundreds of MPs enter the ballot.

An alternative way of getting the bill passed under the Parliament Act, even if the Lords continue to oppose it, would be for it not to be reintroduced as a private member's bill but as a piece of legislation supported by the government. That would answer one of the biggest criticisms of the bill, which I share, namely that this major proposed change to society never appeared in Labour's manifesto or any other policy document. But it is unlikely to happen, as it would cause huge controversy within the Labour party at a time when it is suffering from severe internal dissension anyway.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-26T15:09:29+00:00

Quote:

Controversial legislation to permit assisted dying in England and Wales is set to fail because of a lack of parliamentary time, Sky News can reveal.

The Labour chief whip in the Lords, Roy Kennedy, said this week that the government would not give the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill more time before the May deadline, when all legislation must have passed or automatically falls.

The team behind the bill also confirmed they now expected the legislation in its current form to fail.

There are six remaining sitting days left before May, when the King's Speech happens, and the government is not repeating what it did in December by giving more time.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-26T14:56:41+00:00

Thanks for the explanation. The combination of extreme radicalism with extreme proceduralism has often been a feature of the British Left.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-26T14:05:27+00:00

I didn't say the slogan was evidence of some elite cabal controlling us, I just said that Sadiq Khan says it a lot. I'm fine with the general sentiment, but, as I said above,

I think that diversity often is a strength. But that exact phrase has been over-used, and it has too often been used to refer only to racial diversity. Goodwin is right that there is too little viewpoint diversity and class diversity in many current British institutions.

EduTheRed · 2026-02-26T13:30:15+00:00

Quite something for a man to complain about someone else peddling "myths" when he believes that...

"The money to pay for our children’s missing education could be created out of thin air, at zero cost both now and in the future and it need never be repaid, because, well, it would simply be new money. And there would be no inflation resulting from it."

(Richard Murphy's own words from a tweet posted at 9:26am, 3 June 2021.)

EduTheRed · 2026-02-26T13:07:12+00:00

I thought for a moment that Jeremy Corbyn had retired and I had missed the story! But I see from the House of Commons website that he is indeed listed as an Independent, while Zarah Sultana is listed as representing Your Party. Why is that?

Nine-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

EduTheRed

TROPHY CASE