Steven Heywood

Bewildered old man hanging onto fantasies of cups of tea, Fay Wray and the possibility that Inspector Hornleigh might still be working at Scotland Yard

Stuff will include birdwatching and landscape/nature photographs when I'm not being cross with politicians.

https://heywoodbirdwatching.blogspot.com

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Last Notes

2026-03-12 08:38:54 UTC

Our bank notes are routinely redesigned and replaced to keep a step ahead of counterfeiters, which is how Churchill replaced Elizabeth Fry who replaced George Stephenson who replaced the Duke of Wellington.
Nigel was probably over in the U.S. slagging off the United Kingdom to audiences of people Winston Churchill fought against in World War Two when the independent Bank of England — not the government — had a public consultation on what should be on our bank notes. The will of the people was that it should be wildlife.
Wouldn't it be great if politicians got this worked up about child poverty, environmental crisis or Donald Trump ordering the bombing and killing of schoolchildren to divert attention from the ones he and his buddies fucked.
#UKPolitics
#FivePoundNote
https://www.thepoke.com/2026/03/12/farage-wants-to-overturn-the-woke-will-of-the-people-who-voted-for-banknotes-to-feature-animals-instead-of-historical-figures/?utm_medium+pic=null

2025-12-17 13:04:47 UTC

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The other question is: if the cost/benefit analysis concludes that's an acceptable, if higher than expected or hoped for, cost of rejoining how much did leaving Erasmus cost the country over the past five years?

2025-09-10 00:10:09 UTC

A morning walk round Moore Nature Reserve and a wet afternoon in Widnes.
#Birdwatching
#MooreNatureReserve
#SpikeIsland
https://heywoodbirdwatching.blogspot.com/2025/09/along-mersey.html

2025-08-28 10:16:36 UTC

"How significant is the fact that Tony Blairs involved in discussions about a post war Gaza?"
Ash Sarkar : "Well, I guess it's because Satan was unavailable"
#Gaza
#UKPolitics
#TonyBlair
https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/1n25ht3/how_significant_is_the_fact_that_tony_blairs/

2025-08-27 09:33:05 UTC

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The short form of this is:
Nigel Farage is proposing to give taxpayers' money to the Taliban to receive and deal with people who worked with UK armed forces against them because Reform voters hate brown faces more than they support our servicemen and women and they'll be too stupid to realise they'll have been stripped of their rights in the process.
#UKPolitics
#ReformUK

2025-08-27 09:16:43 UTC

So Farage is promising to spend at least £10bn on housing immigrants in non-existent RAF bases and paying the Taliban for taking back the people who have fled their atrocious regime (including a lot of Afghans who had to flee because they had worked with our Armed Forces, a move putting our forces personnel in danger in the future because it ensures they won't get cooperation from the locals in a theatre of war). And to facilitate this he'll strip British people of their fundamental human rights.
And the Reform voters who swallowed the lie that everything shitty in their lives was the fault of Brussels and are now swallowing the lie that everything that's shitty in their lives is the fault of immigrants will feel their lives getting shittier and will be more than ready to be told that the people down the road who are black, or gay, or trans, or who have ginger hair or whatever are to blame for the shit show they voted for.
#UKPolitics
#ReformUK

2025-07-02 06:51:24 UTC

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Surely a protest approved by government is an affirmation rather than a protest? At the very least an affirmation of the government's benign toleration of slightly uncomfortable dissent.

2025-05-24 08:39:49 UTC

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Updating both the Council Tax valuation data and the valuation bands would be a good start, the change of the price of housing and the change in the variation of the price of housing since 1991 is enormous. Similarly a review of land tax allowances and subsidies could have the double benefit of raising revenue/cutting costs and releasing hoarded land approved for development.
A very quick no-cost measure to begin to address plutocratic influence would be the prohibition of gifts to MPs and a (very low) upper limit on donations to parties. This would need to include criminal penalties for infringement, a fine of a tiny faction of one percent of wealth would not be a deterrent but the constraints imposed by having a criminal record might.
It might also be worth exploring having MPs subject to the same rules on conflict of interest as local councillors so if they have a side hustle they can't vote in favour of their employer or clients.

2025-05-15 13:03:58 UTC

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There's also the issue of the lack of stored water in the ground due to the widespread concreting over of land, including gardens; overgrazing in the West and the move to prairie farming in the East; and the building on flood meadows and similar retaining features. The result is that even without the impacts of climate change there's a greater incidence of flash-flooding which, understandably, leads to calls for the better drainage of rivers into the sea, which leads to even lesser water retention, which creates a greater demand for the water from reservoirs because the supply from natural aquifers is depleted. Still, the government's Build, Baby, Build Bill should address all that, shouldn't it.

2025-05-12 06:55:32 UTC

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But of course the consequences are nothing to do with the government because the BoE is independent. Unless the consequences are positive, in which case they are due to government policy.

2025-05-03 12:10:15 UTC

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There's a significant difference between getting people motivated to hold their nose and vote for a party they don't like to effect a change of government from the God-awful to the hopefully not actively too bad and getting them motivated to change one MP they didn't interact with for another MP they probably won't interact with which scarce any impact on a government's huge majority. It shouldn't be so — the election of any MP should be a serious business — but if only 31% of the electorate could be coaxed to vote Labour to kick out the Tories after the disaster of the previous fifteen years the by-election was probably too big an ask.
Perhaps we need to vigorously talk up the prospects and impacts of the Greens (for good or bad) so they become seen by the stay-at-homes as an active option rather than a passive protest and maybe that will become an alternative gravitational pull on Labour direction.
#UKPolitics

2025-03-26 21:57:34 UTC

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Perhaps a simple industrial strategy of increasing demand in the market by not yet further diminishing the spending power of the consumer?

2025-03-16 11:10:21 UTC

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We used to do a very good line in public unrest until the invention of talking movies. Correlation isn't causation of course, or at least it didn't used to be before YouTube channels, but I wonder how and why we became so passive away from football matches.

2025-03-02 12:48:31 UTC

Fucks sake, Auntie, read the room.
#Trump
#BBC
https://files.mastodonapp.uk/media_attachments/files/114/092/906/842/101/022/original/c2bf927f2f78f79d.png

2025-03-01 21:17:32 UTC

Fuck around and find out.
#Trump
#Ukraine
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/norwegian-fuel-supplier-refuses-u-s-warships-over-ukraine/

2025-03-01 18:31:16 UTC

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It's too much to hope that she remembers how bad Austerity 1.0 was for the economy (the real one, not the City algorithms). Given that we're told defence spending has to increase significantly that should be her rationale for tearing up those damned silly rules.

2025-01-20 11:16:31 UTC

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There needs to be an expansion of the workforce, which is not helped by the abolition of the nurse training bursary, and an expansion in the space for them to work in. And that, whether the government likes it or not, involves increasing the amount of money spent and spending it on old-fashioned stuff like staff and buildings, and investing in a marginal excess of both so that every Winter isn't an emergency.

2025-01-19 10:39:45 UTC

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And don't forget that the benefits system requires that you submit your weekly quota of job applications whether or not suitable jobs are being advertised.

2024-08-05 11:26:29 UTC

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There's also the danger that a list of professions/qualifications/organisations to be used as a gateway to membership of the second chamber also defines who is excluded from the chamber and many of those will be the people most impacted by public policy. Qualification and membership of organisations are both predicated on time and resource opportunities not everybody enjoys.