Sage Vals

I know I've posted this before. But it is worth repeating.... Never believe anything that comes from a war zone, irrespective of which side it comes from. The truth will only be known, if ever, after the conflict is over.

@ReallyRadley IMHO, I would say that it is a contraction of "for all it is worth". So "it's" is correct.

Question: when you use the phrase “for all it[’]s worth” are you using a contraction or a possessive?

@TeeceDanie10744 @_adamcherry_ @max__young A citizens assembly is a bunch of people who are specially selected as already agreeing with whatever it is you want them to agree to. I know that sounds a lot like MPs, but it is subtly different.😉

@_adamcherry_ @max__young I thought we already had a "citizens assembly " ? Ya know house of commons....

The Streeting manifesto, w/ @max__young: •Return to the EU customs union •Tax capital gains on the same basis as income. •Replace inheritance tax with a lifetime gifts tax. •Increase corporation tax. •Slash the welfare budget to fund defence. Although later he insisted his words had been twisted… •Set NHS employment targets: each Integrated Care Board accountable for getting patients back to work, with patient data linked to ONS pay records and benefit claims. •Establish a new Ministry of Migration. •A Labour Party that is “less factional”. Good luck… •Introduce citizens’ assemblies to “create the conditions in which we achieve sustainable, lasting change with public support.” •Maintain Mahmood’s immigration reforms. While claiming he is ‘uncomfortable’ with them to placate the left… •Maintain the indefinite ban on puberty blockers for under-18s. •Establish “a climate and sustainability office within a new prime minister’s department” and create a “real green investment bank.” •Create a new inheritance tax and capital gains exemption for business owners who transfer their businesses to a trust for the benefit of customers and/or employees. •Cap or scrap business property relief. •Abolish Business Asset Disposal Relief. •Require companies to publish “clear action plans for achieving gender balance and the widening of diversity.”

New instalment of "Still Here Keir?" Week 9: Ed Balls Day, placating The Donald, even more Mandelson related testimony and some plotting. sagevals.wordpress.com/2026/04/29/sti…

Ed Balls I'm keeping everything simple and traditional this year. Best wishes to all! #EdBallsDay

Not quite right: the voting age should be the oldest of any of these. Equal oldest if you wish, but what really matters is that voters mustn’t be too young for *anything*.

The next right wing British government needs to impose voting at 18 across the country for everything. The age of majority for everything should be 18. The age of consent, voting age, alcohol, smoking etc. You are either an adult or you are not.

@SimonMagus That was the first thing I was told on my first ever day of political campaigning. That and never put your fingers in the letterbox in case there's a dog on the other side of the door!

This is a reminder that you should always push the letter or leaflet fully through the letterbox.

@Carol57723476 @celtic_jaime @GrahamGeog That's just over 4 shillings and sixpence. Still bloody expensive if you ask me.

@celtic_jaime @GrahamGeog 23p for cigarettes I can't believe it 😲

Life in the 1970s

This weeks up date: Is Keir still here? Well, yes, but he did go to Paris for a virtual meeting, so there's that. Also features Olly Robbins plus the usual cast sagevals.wordpress.com/2026/04/22/sti…

Just one week to wait! I'm going old school with my celebrations this year. No fuss, no mess. Back to basics.

Rolls-Royce SMR has signed a contract with Great British Energy to build three small modular reactors at Wylfa, on the coast of Anglesey. Hallelujah, 1.4 gigawatts of generating capacity! That's power enough for three million homes for sixty years. And three thousand construction jobs at peak build. And £2 billion of public money committed, plus another £600 million from the National Wealth Fund. This, by any serious measure, the most important energy decision a British government has taken in a generation. Nuclear baseload is the only credible route to sovereign power at a price that doesn't bankrupt the manufacturing sector, and Rolls-Royce's small modular design is one of the most promising pieces of energy engineering on the planet. It is British-designed and it's scalable and the fact that we are building it at all is, in the context of 30 Years of Hurt partially inflicted on us by absolutely catastrophic energy policy, something close to a miracle. But alas, the reactors will not produce a single watt of electricity until the mid-2030s. Credit where credit is due: the contract is worth something, and the decision to go ahead with it took more institutional courage than most things that come out of Whitehall. But the timetable is an education in why this country cannot do things at the speed that the situation demands. Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. 50% higher than France and Germany. 3x the cost of energy in America. Those prices are baked into everything we manufacture and everything on every shelf in every shop; they are the reason the steelworks are on life support and the pubs are closing and your energy bill arrives quarterly like a small act of violence against your household finances. This has been true for the better part of a decade, and in the works for much longer than that. Every government since Blair's has understood that the combination of North Sea decline, renewable intermittency, and total dependence on imported gas was building toward something very dangerous. They were perfectly happy with the cost of decline, knowing you'd be the one paying for it, so they waved the concern away, and now here we are. Talks of rationed petrol. Industrial electricity costs that are tipping businesses into administration at a rate that should terrify the Treasury, if anyone in the Treasury still even gives a toss about the insolvency statistics. And the government's answer - the serious, considered, long-awaited answer - is reactors that will come online approximately 10 years from now, assuming the planning process, the regulatory review, and the Final Investment Decision all proceed without the kind of institutional constipation that has characterised every major infrastructure project in this country since the Channel Tunnel. The contract, I should note, has not yet reached Final Investment Decision. So planning has not begun. The regulatory pathway is being described, in the careful language of officials who have been taught never to commit to anything that might one day be quoted back at them - remember, nothing is as dead in this country as personal accountability - as "developing." If you have ever worked inside or adjacent to the British planning system, you will know what that word means. It means nobody has said no yet, but nobody has the authority or the inclination to say yes, and the whole thing will take exactly as long as it takes, and if you don't like it there is an appeals process you are welcome to die waiting to resolve. Any serious energy policy in this country would look like Progress'. That means emergency nuclear legislation modelled on the Vaccine Taskforce: the same legal authority, the same override powers, the same refusal to accept "the process takes as long as the process takes" as an answer to anything. It would put reactors online in three years. That is what countries that take energy security seriously do, and it is well past time Britain started behaving as though it were one of them. It's of immediate priority, because the nation's wallets are empty now, and we can put money back into them with a more enlightened energy policy. But it goes further than that, too. By 2030, the ability to power domestic AI infrastructure - datacentres, computing clusters, the architecture on which the next industrial revolution will be built - will be almost as strategically important as vaccine access was during Covid. The country that cannot generate its own electricity at scale will not be the country making decisions about its own future. Someone else will be making them for us. Wylfa is the right decision. It should have been taken fifteen years ago, and at the current pace of institutional dawdling it will take another ten to bear fruit.

In January 2025 @vizcomic moved to Bluesky. On Bluesky, they have 29.8k followers, as of today, April 2026. Despite not posting on X/Twitter since 2025, they still have 295k followers on X. That's nearly 10 times more on X than on Bluesky. Great marketing decision from Viz.

Already out of date due to Madelsonian events, which will appear in next week's instalment. But here it is anyway...

New instalment. This week: Keir's Still Here; Trump chickens out, or not; Keir tours the Middle East and the Chagos deal goes on the back-burner, for now. sagevals.wordpress.com/2026/04/14/sti…

@janeisginger @DickDelingpole Believe me, it's exactly the same as the one I had in the 1970s.

@DickDelingpole I’m just saying I don’t think this is a picture of an original one from the 1970s.

I was trying to tell the kids at work (my "colleagues") about these things. Blank looks all round. When did they stop being a thing? Do they teach Geography any more?

What about electric vehicles carrying heavy batteries? That damages roads.

Absolutely fucking do not. People who call without texting first are the worse people in the world.