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Reform is boycotting today’s Welsh Parliament session in solidarity with Joe Martin, their member. “If you silence one of us you silence us all” says Helen Jenner, Reform’s newish Welsh leader…
Yesterday he was told he wouldn’t be invited to speak in the Senedd again until he said sorry for a question the presiding officer thought was “unnecessarily provocative and deliberately offensive“. He asked about “the demographic replacement of white British people taking place in the UK”…
A banana republic style move from the Senedd. People get elected to say things and ask questions…
As an update on Guido’s story about banks warring with each other over crypto, George Osborne has waded in by backing tokenised assets. Lots of interventions from the coalition bigwigs today…
Osborne, who is an adviser to OpenAI, told the Digital Asset Summit in London that when he was Chancellor the Treasury began the push for open banking, which requires the big banks to let customers share their data with competitors. A monopoly was broken…
The podcaster and former Chancellor argued that tokenisation could work in a similar way for assets most people have never been able to own like shares in private companies. The main banks want all the control for themselves…
On a panel with crypto company Coinbase, Osborne said:
“I’m not saying we sat in Treasury and foresaw that that was going to happen, but we knew if you broke up some of the monopolistic practices that basically worked against us, something would come of it. And I think there’s something similar here with traditional finance, which is the use of tokenisation. Who knows how clever people in the distributed database industry will parcel up the ownership of assets that have not really been available to the general population… You know, it’s hard to get a share of a private company…
If you revolutionise and open up decentralised finance and tokenisation … I can only think it’s going to be moving in one direction – spread ownership. And I think one of the central policy challenges in the Treasury today, here or in any other Treasury, is how am I going to spread capital assets? … The solution to that is make sure the general population are getting some share of that return to capital.”
Meanwhile the EU is pushing ahead with plans to launch a ‘Digital Euro’. 1984 is just around the corner…
The former PM tells Bloomberg:
“Today, instead of launching an argument about rejoining, which I think would be a very long and painful argument, and who knows where it would end up, instead of that, focus on how do we be the best friend, best neighbour, best partner…
If you start endlessly producing this idea that we’re actually on a path to rejoining, I think you’re in danger of getting a less good partnership deal because of course the EU countries will just think: well, these guys are gonna rejoin anyway, so what’s the point in giving them a good partnership deal…
If you’re not going to, you know, commit to trying to make the partnership stronger because you’re flirting with rejoining, I think there’s some dangers there…
I don’t think actually necessarily joining a customs union is the right answer. If you look at the economic problems we have today, I don’t really think they’ve got anything to do with Brexit at all. I mean, our economic problems are we are overspending, over-borrowing, over-taxing, over-regulated, and far too much being spent on working age welfare. Those are a set of problems that have nothing to do with Brexit.
We need a government that actually gets spending under control, gets taxes down, helps entrepreneurs, deals with our borrowing problem, reforms the welfare, and massively deregulates so we can build houses, build infrastructure. None of those have got anything to do with Europe. So that’s sort of, in a way, that’s my point. Do we really want to go into another decade-long debate about whether we should be in or out, when actually we should deal with our own problems while making the partnership model work?…
I fought the campaign to stay in on an amended basis, and I obviously wanted to win that campaign. I was desperately disappointed that we lost that campaign. But I’m a democrat, a believer in democracy. We voted to leave, and I think the right thing now is to try and become, you know, not just neighbours, partners, and friends of the EU, but the best friends, the best neighbours, the best partners. And I think we can make that work.”
Rejoin making fewer friends…
The Foreign Office has spent almost £13,000 on branded merchandise and sweets in its campaign to get a judge who supports the Chagos Surrender installed in the International Court of Justice. Do the HMRC school ambassadors have anything to say about that to the kids?
In response to a question from Nick Timothy the government said:
“The successful campaign in support of Professor Akande’s candidacy for election to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) means that a UK judge will once again sit on the ICJ bench following a nine-year absence. This outcome underlines the UK’s commitment to the international rule of law. The total spent on branded items since 4 July 2024 was £12,723.71.”
Acting for Zambia in Mauritius’ 2019 case at the ICJ, Akande supported the motion calling for the UK to give away the Chagos Islands “as rapidly as possible.” He argued the case was “about the international law obligations regarding decolonisation” and that it should not be seen as a “purely bilateral dispute.”
Akande, a legal scholar at Oxford, also advised the Corbyn Labour opposition in 2018 that the UK’s bombing of Syria did not comply with international law following the notorious Douma chemical attack. He additionally co-authored an article arguing that triggering the Trident deterrent “would not be acting lawfully” and would be “neither necessary nor proportional for either repelling an on-going attack or for stopping an imminent one.”
The spending includes £8,011.77 on branded sweets and £1,574.48 on ‘accessories’. Those will leave a bitter taste…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”