United Kingdom

Angela Rayner has accused the Conservatives of cynically applying a “sticking plaster” to council finances to get through the next election, as local authority leaders warn that more will go bust next year.

The shadow communities secretary said Labour was “under no illusions” about the financial mess it would inherit in local councils if it gained power, after the Tories “took a sledgehammer” to budgets for more than a decade.

It was a freezing Friday evening early in February 2023, when my boiler broke. An engineer was called, several cold days passed, and his declaration came in sombre tones: ‘uneconomic to repair’. Li…

The Conservative party believed voters would back them no matter how they behaved

Kathleen Crane was handed a 12-month community order and ordered to repay more than £18,000 she was accused of taking from her branch in Eastbourne, East Sussex, when she was sentenced in 2010.

She was one of hundreds of branch owner-operators convicted after the Post Office’s defective Horizon accounting system – provided by the IT company Fujitsu – produced figures that suggested money was missing.

Delivering the judgment, Lord Justice Holroyde said: “We have no doubt that her prosecution was an abuse of process. Nor do we have any doubt that her conviction is unsafe.”

This is not simply a story about a horrifying miscarriage of justice. It is also a story about one of the most corrupt officers in British history and the police establishment that allowed him to thrive in his criminality and then protected him. It is about a justice system so indifferent to the fates of the men wrongfully convicted that it did nothing to clear their names for almost 47 years.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11138800

An American scientist has sparked a trans-Atlantic tempest in a teapot by offering Britain advice on its favorite hot beverage.

Bryn Mawr College chemistry professor Michelle Francl says one of the keys to a perfect cup of tea is a pinch of salt. The tip is included in Francl’s book “Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea,” published Wednesday by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Not since the Boston Tea Party has mixing tea with salt water roiled the Anglo-American relationship so much.

The salt suggestion drew howls of outrage from tea-lovers in Britain, where popular stereotype sees Americans as coffee-swilling boors who make tea, if at all, in the microwave.

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The U.S. Embassy in London intervened in the brewing storm with a social media post reassuring “the good people of the U.K. that the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy.”

Young people in this country have had it too easy for too long, writes Ryan Coogan. If the pandemic, housing crisis and rotating cast of prime ministers didn’t toughen them up, perhaps a stint in the army will...

The UK government is once again navigating legal and political hurdles over its plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. The latest debate is over the emergency bill that legally declares Rwanda a safe place to send refugees (despite the supreme court ruling the opposite).

The government has now told civil servants that, if a minister tells them to, they must ignore rule 39 orders from the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.

The court enforces the European convention on human rights, to which the UK and 45 other European countries are party. Rule 39 allows the court to issue interim measures to stop any of these governments from taking action that could or would violate someone’s human rights.