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Is it treason to sell honours?

'A former British government minister has told The Daily Beast that he’s made two formal complaints to the police against Prince Charles, alleging that he and his top aide arranged for an honor to be awarded to a Saudi businessman who had donated more than $2 million to his pet causes.

The Right Honorable Norman Baker, who was the Home Office minister for crime prevention from 2013 to 2014 and a transport minister for three and a half years before that, told The Daily Beast that he has written privately to Cressida Dick, the head of London’s Metropolitan Police force, and filed a complaint against Prince Charles via normal channels in an effort to force a police investigation into the affair.'

https://www.thedailybeast.com/norman-baker-reports-prince-charles-to-police-over-alleged-cash-for-honors-scheme?ref=home

CONservatives are saying measures restricting voting rights are needed to protect voters from deceit etc...

Bit ironic when Doris won an election on a manifesto that was deceitful [no more taxes, no cuts to foreign aid].

Peter Hotez is an American scientist who write opinions for The Daily Beast. Unfortunately, his articles are paywalled, but the extract below from the recent article "The Latest COVID-19 Surge Is Just the Start of a New Nightmare" is interesting:

"This fall, we could enter a period of great instability, and possibly one that resembles the unrest linked to Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests during the late 1960s. The differences between now and previous waves or surges of the pandemic include some signs of acceleration in pandemic aggression arising from an increasingly disenfranchised far right, an even more exhausted and depleted health system, and in some cases, the lapse of federal aid measures like eviction protection and federally boosted unemployment."

A winter of discontent? And, our home-grown crazies like imitating the Yanks, so watch out for nutters foaming at the mouth.

'must have,had a bug'

Hopefully it is not a virus?

Worth a read - 'Junk Food Is Bad For Plants'

https://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/junk-food-is-bad-for-plants-too

'As for Bolsonaro himself, the message is clear: “I have three alternatives for my future: prison, death, or victory,” Bolsonaro said last week at an event with evangelical leaders. “You can be sure the first alternative doesn’t exist. I’m doing the right thing and I owe nothing to anyone. Wherever the people have been, I’ve been.” There is no subtlety here: He is saying that he will not accept impeachment or democratic defeat at the ballot box and is willing to die trying to stay in power.'

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/05/bolsonaro-september-7-brazil-trump-january-6/

Things could get messy real fast.

Is the coup tomorrow on Independance Day?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/06/brazil-warning-bolsonaro-may-be-planning-military-coup-amid-rallies

Both up on no new news... make sure you get off before the elevator hits the roof and comes crashing down again. But, well done for squeezing the sentiment bottle.

I froze the screen whilst listening to Doris speak to Parliament... quite full because of the Afghanistan statement. I counted 62 Tories in the frozen screen; only 2 were wearing masks. The Speaker did ask that MPs wear them out of respect to other MPs and the House's Staff.

#disrespect

The Houses of Parliament and Elizabeth Tower, commonly called Big Ben, repainted with the English flag. Flag waving in the extreme by Doris and his friends, The English Nationalists [aka the TEN Friends]. Do they think they have a God given right to TEN Downing Street?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9962433/St-Georges-flag-displayed-Big-Ben-time-90-years.html

The worst case would be that they do not produce enough to fulfil the hedge and penalties are so severe the company is bankrupted.

I will leave the more optimistic projections to those with 'Strong Buy' opinions but it would be interesting to see their rough calculations and underlying assumptions.

balancedviewer,

Angus have not published details of the hedging they have done other than the RNS dated 3 June which included that they had hedged 'approximately 70% of the Company's and its partners' share of future gas sales, estimated under a conservative projection'. What does approximately 70% of a conservative projection even mean?

Have they hedge a specific quantity of gas? If they have do they keep all of the revenue if they achieve greater production than that figure? Are there penalties if they fail to produce the conservative projection?

Until more details are provided and the actual gas production figures are known any estimates of revenue are likely to be meaningless as they will have been done without a reasonable level of info to start with.

'Buyers taking it up'?

Why is the price down 6% at the moment?

cuddothisnow is wrong when he writes 'They KNOW VALUE of Saltfleeby has gone up 3 TIMES'.

Approximately 70% of Gas sales are hedged at 43p a therm for 3 years from July 2022. To claim that the value is 3x when that quantity is hedged seems disingenuous. In addition, current futures for August 2025 are back to historic prices, so Angus are unlikely to be selling for delivery in 2025 at the current spiked prices.

https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/NFK25/futures-prices

You cannot sell gas onto the market during a spike in prices if you do not produce any to see.

Rees Double-Barrelled Toff writes in the high-brow Sunday paper [the Express on Sunday] that higher taxes are a no-no because of the sacred Tory Manifesto. Does that mean he expects to get sacked in the expected reshuffle? Surely even Doris cannot stomach the Leader of the House writing about how bad his policies are?

Funny how he has not already resigned over the Border between the mainland and NI. I suppose if you are going to pretend to be principled pick the best one before you get sacked?

Still no buys - why not?

No offence meant, so apologies if my sarcastic comment went down like a lump of salt.

What irks e is that the model of paying for social care from current GOV income does not work as when the model was built people had a much lower life expectancy and there were far fewer expensive treatments available; so people live longer than expected and require more expensive treatments than were envisaged.

The idea that now that the bills are much higher that working people under that State Pension age should foot the extra costs is unfair. Boris's sister was on LBC yesterday; their mother has dementia and the care costs are £80k a year. The lady owns a valuable flat in London. If she lives another 5 years and her care costs are capped at £80k then working people [who often cannot afford to pay off student loans let alone buy a house in London] will end up paying £400k for her care when she could have sold her property, paid her care costs and still left hundreds of thousands of quid to her already wealthy kids / the donkey charity etc.

I do not have an equitable solution to offer but hiking NI seems grossly unfair when it excludes what is nominally called rental income [pensions, dividends, capital gains, interest, property income etc].

Always good to invest in a stable democracy [or be mates with the folk who do the coup d'état]. A bit of red for HUM and BZT in the morning?

Time to increase NI on worker's pay so old folks who own their houses do not have to sell them to pay for their own health care. Great policy - it will keep the workers poor, in the place and renting from the landed gentry who structure their affairs, so no NI will be payable on the property taxes.

A friend is a teacher who went into school from Wed last week in preparation for kids going back tomorrow. Friend has already been pinged to go get a PCR test thanks to exposure at work where they seem to be acting if it is all over already.

I realise GOV wants to get herd immunity in kids as soon as possible, but GOV may be suggesting the use of ping pong bats to clear the stench of scandal that is likely to be coming around the corner.

They seem to have badly handled the decision to vaccinate kids [which is likely to be made after too many kids have acquired long Covid]. It may be a messy few months.