The Italy-Albania deal being referenced isn’t them keeping asylum seekers in Albania while their claim is processed, it’s shipping them off to Albania while their claim is processed.

I assume you mean Albania? That’s what the part I quoted is about.

Sir Keir has signalled he is open to pursuing an arrangement similar to Italy’s migration deal with Albania, whereby asylum seekers will be held in the Balkan state while their claims are processed.

Thank god they scrapped that gimmicky Rwanda scheme, eh?

The other is Labour Yimby, a grassroots group started by activists, which drew a crowd for its first parliamentary reception and is backed by some of the most vociferous housing campaigners from the new intake: Milton Keynes North’s Chris Curtis, Chipping Barnet’s Dan Tomlinson and Earley and Woodley’s Yuan Yang.

So I did some googling and I fell down a real rabbit hole, so I’m making that everyone else’s problem as well. Apologies for the long comment posted nearly a day later.

It’s surprisingly hard to find any direct info on this ‘Labour YIMBY’ group online (the name doesn’t help). Their website is very sparse (and also doesn’t use HTTPS for whatever reason), which seems to be where the Guardian is getting this idea they’re a ‘grassroots’ group from. The only other info on their website is a mailto link for marc.harris@labouryimby.org.uk^[1]. The website was registered in April and their Twitter account was created in May, this is also the only source of official communication I could find of the group. Politico puts the launch of the group on 9 July at an event held in the Walker’s of Whitehall, however. This doting report by Chris Worrall tell us that consultancy group College Green Group and construction lobby group LPDF^[2] sponsored the event and made speeches. Ethan Shone’s reporting is more damning:

While Parliament was in recess, [Labour YIMBY] held a summer reception along with the Fabian Society think tank. The event was hosted and sponsored by international lobbying firm FTI Consulting, which represents Keepmoat Homes, property developer Hammerson, “whole life cycle real estate company” Impact Capital Group and asset managers such as Macquarie and Vanguard. FTI employee Abdi Duale, who is currently standing for reelection to Labour’s National Executive Committee, gave a speech at the reception. The YIMBYs held another reception, this time in Parliament, this week. Duale was again present, as was Mike Katz, the director of lobbying firm Field Consulting, who is also chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, and Paul Brocklehurst, the chair of LPDF, an industry lobbying group for some of the biggest developers.

This second reception is the one mentioned in the Guardian article, one sponsored by self-described ‘build-to-rent’ group Get Living, a group who had to pay £18 million for flammable-style cladding in January. Despite their young age and supposed grassroots-ness, they were able to get quite a few big name for this reception, including a minister:

At the Labour YIMBY reception in parliament’s Churchill room, including a speaker from property management firm GetLiving … Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Western … Labour MPs Emily Thornberry, Stella Creasy, Chris Curtis, Yuan Yang, James Asser, Tom Rutland, Kanishka Narayan, Mike Reader, Uma Kumaran, Sonia Kumar, Gurinder Josan, Deirdre Costigan, Sean Woodcock, Johanna Baxter, Dawn Butler, Jim Dickson and Ruth Cadbury, who was working the room lobbying for transport committee chair … Labour Together’s Charles White, Can Vargas and Jack Shaw … NEC’s Abdi Duale … JLM chief Mike Katz … Labour YIMBY Chair Marc Harris … Sodali & Co’s Simon Petar … Airbus’ Tom Williams … Hacks Josiah Mortimer, Jonn Elledge, Lee Harpin and Tom Scotson.

Personally, I wouldn’t consider a group of Labour insiders that’s able to attract sponsorships from industry lobby groups to be a ‘grassroots group’.

Also, lots of words start off as acronyms and then lose that status. ‘Laser’ is a good example: originally ‘Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’, but now always written in lowercase.

But we generally only do that for acronyms that become familiar and well know (scuba, taser, etc). The article itself feels the need to spell out what it stands for and putting it in lower case just reeks of trying to manufacture that familiarity and the legitimacy such familiarity carries.

But for Labour in government, it is not just a dividing line with the Tories but also what it sees as its most powerful attack on the new electoral threat from the Greens. Political strategists plan to paint the Greens as local blockers to a raft of projects from electricity pylons to affordable housing.

For a party that won its first council majority in 2023, it amazing how much the the Greens come up in this ‘NIMBY’ discourse. The fact Labour centrists feel the need to take digs at them is encouraging though, it shows that they’re scared of losing ground to the Greens.

Also, I hate who every was the editor on this article, YIMBY / NIMBY are acronyms, they should be spelt in all caps.

Honestly, I don’t think politicians should be able to accept these kinds of gifts at all. The Tories are almost certainly worse and it is unfair that Labour is held to a higher standard in this regard, but at the same time I don’t think that excuses Starmer accepting more gifts than any Labour leader since 1997.

Not enough capacity:

To host a game at the tournament European football’s governing body Uefa [sic] requires stadia to have a minimum capacity of 30,000. […] Windsor, which is also home to Irish League outfit Linfield holds 18,000. It would need another 12,000 seats to be able to host a game.

As someone who spends more money than I should on music from Bandcamp, I’m interested to see if they ever get payments working. I remember people talking about a federated BC alternative, where the 10% platform fee goes to the instance you’re on, when they got bought by that music licensing company.

Also, first paragraph under “Integrating with the Fediverse”, you put Bandcamp when I think you meant Bandwagon.

They’ve been spouting out this ‘£22b black hole’ line for weeks, but now they suddenly need time to make sure the figures are accurate?

“Raise taxes on working people or reform to secure [the NHS’] future. We know working people can’t afford to pay more, so it is reform or die.”

Alexa, show me a false dichotomy.

It’s amazing how the their report names austerity as the culprit of the NHS’ waning condition, but Streeting’s solution seems to just change where money is allocated. The UK spends significantly less on Health compared to other developed countries, is it really surprising that our results would be significantly worse?

This isn’t unique to the Green Party, pretty much all the major parties have internal divisions. Take the recent Labour stuff where the socialists have butted heads with technocratic front bench over the two child benefit cap. The Greens are different in that they don’t whip their MPs or Cllrs, as they believe they should be free to vote with their conscience, which has the major disadvantage of making the party line muddy and hard to count on.

Yeah, I’m not going to defend Mastodon’s frankly bizarre Like system. It’s not even a privacy thing as favourites are fully public.

It simply can’t really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I’m not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).

Mastodon needs to implement group support, you can follow the issue here (don’t get your hopes up though).

Their app is open source, but it doesn’t give any instructions on how to self-host it, in fact it seems to not have been designed with self-hosting in mind given the forking section of the ReadMe:

You have our blessing 🪄✨ to fork this application! However, it’s very important to be clear to users when you’re giving them a fork.

Please be sure to:

• Change all branding in the repository and UI to clearly differentiate from Bluesky.
• Change any support links (feedback, email, terms of service, etc) to your own systems.
• Replace any analytics or error-collection systems with your own so we don’t get super confused.

The impression I get from Bluesky is that it doesn’t view federation as a core feature of its platform, just a nice technical oddity. I’m no expert on the AT protocol, but from a quick skim of the quickstart, their view of federation seems to be having disparate data repositories (Personal Data Servers) app developers can put their app data into. It doesn’t really seems to be about different software communicating with each other.

In contrast, ActivityPub is about passing JSON between servers in a somewhat standard format so different software can reasonably understand what that JSON represents and act on it in a way that makes sense for that software.

(But again, I’m don’t know anything about the AT protocol, I could be completely wrong here)

Feddit.uk makes our finances public, about £35 a month. So about £0.11 per active user.

Also, I run sappho.social out of a £5 a month VPS.

Guys, we can’t introduce a wealth tax, all the right people will just leave. I mean look at Switzerland, they’ve had a wealth tax for centuries and if there’s anything they’re lacking it’s rich people.

What a weird take. How is it daft for the British public to decide the rules public officials have to follow? If I fucked off to America two weeks into a job, I’d be fired in an instance; I don’t see why MPs should be held to a different standard.

I wouldn’t call cutting the Department of Health’s and Education’s budget by a billion pounds each not making the country worse.

I hope this is just the Murdoch press stirring shit, but it does sound like what Starmer and co. would do. Pack the Parliamentary Party with allies and then make them the only ones who can decide future leaders.

Reminds me of my favourite Yes, Minister bit.