The sad thing is, objective assessment of all PMs of my lifetime favours Major. He left the country in a better condition than he got it, and didn't start any wars. Meanwhile Blair who should have fixed everything: Iraq, house prices, in work benefits creating underclass.

Sometimes I hate history.

It's interesting, how stage of lif3 affects how you see a decade. I remember the 90s as crap at the start because recession, better in the middle, and a real time of hope in its second half. But I wasn't a queer kid suffering Section 28, for example.

The optimism in 97 was cruelly dashed though.

This

I would advise her to plan an exit. The easiest destination in Ireland, because Brits can live there visa free.

It is. Worth looking.

A Chinese USB to serial chip is pennies. I would remove the 30 euro requirement.

obviously fucking not.

What happened here is Labour reached out to support her and they had conversations at which point some Labour wanker said "we've got this great initiative and we'd like you to champion it" and Esther obviously said yes because she was told it would help kids like Brianna.

When you are besieged by trans people with real lived experience telling you that Brianna's death was the result of a toxic atmosphere of hate and not because she possessed a phone, don't you think listening to them might be a good idea?

Not quite

I'm not, oddly.

I do not want an American style media landscape in the UK.

Growing up in a very nasty far right family, I have sat through many an anti BBC rant. I recognise exactly where this is coming from.

Into this comes Trump, who's desperate for anything to deflect from the Epstein files, and also subscribes to the "woke media" thing.

Panorama were caught with their trousers down on that edit, but that's the sum total of the story. The rest is manufactured for the reasons outlined above.

Up to this come the commercial media, for whom the BBC is free at the point of delivery competition they'd like to eliminate.

Both parties have an interest in undermining and weakening the BBC, and you're watching the result.

In fact the BBC dances to the tune of whichever government is in power.

But it's crucial to the right and in particular the far right, to see themselves as embattled outsiders, under attack. Journalists asking them awkward questions or reporting things they don't like are fed into this narrative.

The right of politics has long held a view that the BBC is somewhere far to the left of Che Guevara. This led the previous government to pack its board with their people.