You don’t have to be Carole Cadwalladr to remember Cambridge Analytica and its questionable use of 87 million individuals’ Facebook data in the 2016 US presidential election. Cambridge Analytica was part of the SCL group of companies bought by Emerdata Limited in January 2018. Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO, Alexander Nix, was caught in a Channel 4 sting boasting about entrapping political opponents with prostitutes and blackmailing them:
Days later, the Information Commissioner’s Office’s shiny jacketed staff raided the SCL group offices in London and the SCL companies filed for bankruptcy protection weeks later. They are now in liquidation.
Not content with losing Emerdata’s investors millions of dollars, Nix had first made sure he was paid $8.775m by Emerdata before the SCL group collapsed. Nix admitted his blame for the failure of the SCL group and he was subsequently banned from acting as a director for 7 years.
Now Nix has resurfaced. In a true display of a sense of entitlement that can only come from an Old Etonian, Nix has sued Emerdata for a further $10 million plus that he has claims he is owed by the company whose subsidiaries he acknowledged to the Directors’ Disqualification Unit his actions destroyed. Guido suspects that Nix will soon to live to regret this chutzpah. Get your popcorn ready.
At 4.26 p.m., Jon Ashworth was asked on Times Radio by Tom Newton Dunn “it does sound like you’re saying ‘Plan B now Mr Government’?” The Shadow Health Secretary replied:
“We are in favour of Plan B… of course the Plan B, but I’m giving you a broader point, which is if you want to bring infection rates down, particularly amongst children, you’ve got to get on and fix this vaccination programme. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s Plan A, or Plan B, or even the Plan C, which is now floated in some of the news today… We’ve got to deal with the vaccination first”
Six minutes later, a Labour spokesperson clarifies to Sky News:
Labour is not in favour of moving to Plan B on Covid, a spokesperson says. They are in favour of "making Plan A work"
— Sam Coates Sky (@SamCoatesSky) October 21, 2021
Guido gives it a fortnight before Captain Hindsight uses Ashworth’s original quote as a claim they were in favour of moving to Plan B before the government…
According to Americans for Tax Reform, Britain is the most improved country on the 2021 International Trade Barrier Index, jumping from 8th to 4th place since 2019. By implementing its own UK Global Tariff schedule in January 2021 as a replacement for the European Union Common External Tariff, approximately 60% of trade will come into the UK tariff zone free. Additionally, the impressive 60+ continuity or bridging agreements that the UK has signed since 2019 will continue to facilitate international trade.
Bagging the top spots in the International Trade Barrier Index were Singapore, New Zealand and the Netherlands. India, Algeria and China were the worst ranked countries due to their stringent regulations, tariffs and trade barriers. EU powerhouses Germany and France ranked at 13 and 22 respectively.
Speaking at today’s Trade Barrier Index launch at the Taxpayers’ Alliance’s Tufton Street HQ, Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs at the Institute of Economic Affairs, warned that despite this positive news “the UK is still in danger of adopting the EU’s worst barriers”. To benefit from Brexit it is essential that the UK cuts restrictive trading regulations.
Dominic Cummings has provided his blog fans with the solution to Labour’s woes: replace “dud” Sir Keir with “a Midlands* woman who can focus on the public and build a team” – claiming that while he “[doesn’t] know much about Labour MPs … Lisa Nandy seems the closest fit”. Jess Phillips must be furious.
Outlining his rationale in an 11,984 word post today (only 300 fewer than Starmer’s own magnum opus), Cummings writes:
“The media is mainly Labour supporting and most of them HATE Boris. If you ditch Starmer now and replace him with a woman, you will catch a powerful surge of energy from the media. And the country will pay attention. If she hits the ground running, the polls will shift and the whole game will change.”
“Remember how the media ferociously kicked Major to pieces? The will happen again if they can get behind a Labour woman who is competitive and people feel a historic tide.”
Those of us who have followed Lisa Nandy‘s career closely will be surprised by Cummings’ enthusiasm. He all but offered to be her campaign manager…
Cummings adds that Starmer is a “dead player” and has “totally failed to define himself as standing for anything”. According to Cummings, the answer is to “bin him” and find a team that focuses entirely on crime and the economy. Some decent ideas, although as usual, an editor would have helped him express them more succinctly…
*Many have already commented that Wigan isn’t in the Midlands. Cummings says “Coming from Durham I think of middle and north a bit different, everything around there seems ‘middle’ to me.”
Today’s edition of The Times features an unexpected revelation about Desmond Tutu, particularly for the citizens of York. According to a letter sent in by Reverends Alan Wilson and Canon Rosie Harper (the Bishop of Buckingham and his chaplain), Tutu is in fact the former Archbishop of York – which should come as a bit of a surprise to John Sentamu, who actually held that post from 2005 to 2020. In a letter to the editor, Wilson and Harper write:
“Sir, the bishops in the House of Lords who have chosen to speak against the Assisted Dying Bill do not represent the only Christian view. George Carey and Desmond Tutu, the former archbishops of Canterbury and York, are for assisted dying, and hold an equally Christian position…”
The Times tells Guido that it wasn’t an error on the part of the letter’s signatories
The error re Desmond Tutu was mistakenly added in the editing process and was not written by the original authors of the letter. We can only apologise for this, and will be publishing a correction in tomorrow’s paper.
Kind regards,
Times Letters
What is the mental process that messed up the transcription?
Tory MP Tom Hunt didn’t hold back when confronting Paul Mason over his new book’s claims that Priti Patel is facilitating fascism. Hunt challenged the Trot over a quote from a Guardian interview:
“The interests of fascism are being represented in government by right-wing populists and authoritarians” he goes on to say “sadly Boris Johnson”. I’m sorry I think that’s absolutely unacceptable to say that, and please tell me what specifically are what the government or what I’m doing as an MP are promoting/supporting a fascist agenda?”
Mason also ignorantly repeated the canard that references to “cultural Marxism“ echo Nazi language and thinking – when in fact the term has been long and widely used by sympathetic sociologists. All Mason could offer in support of his argument was Priti’s drive to clamp down on illegal immigration…
