UK British News Megathread - aka CWCissey's news thread

https://news.sky.com/story/row-over-new-greggs-vegan-sausage-rolls-heats-up-11597679 (https://archive.ph/5Ba6o)

A heated row has broken out over a move by Britain's largest bakery chain to launch a vegan sausage roll.

The pastry, which is filled with a meat substitute and encased in 96 pastry layers, is available in 950 Greggs stores across the country.

It was promised after 20,000 people signed a petition calling for the snack to be launched to accommodate plant-based diet eaters.


But the vegan sausage roll's launch has been greeted by a mixed reaction: Some consumers welcomed it, while others voiced their objections.

View image on Twitter


spread happiness@p4leandp1nk
https://twitter.com/p4leandp1nk/status/1080767496569974785

#VEGANsausageroll thanks Greggs

7
10:07 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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Cook and food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe declared she was "frantically googling to see what time my nearest opens tomorrow morning because I will be outside".

While TV writer Brydie Lee-Kennedy called herself "very pro the Greggs vegan sausage roll because anything that wrenches veganism back from the 'clean eating' wellness folk is a good thing".

One Twitter user wrote that finding vegan sausage rolls missing from a store in Corby had "ruined my morning".

Another said: "My son is allergic to dairy products which means I can't really go to Greggs when he's with me. Now I can. Thank you vegans."

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pg often@pgofton
https://twitter.com/pgofton/status/1080772793774624768

The hype got me like #Greggs #Veganuary

42
10:28 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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TV presenter Piers Morgan led the charge of those outraged by the new roll.

"Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns," he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Morgan later complained at receiving "howling abuse from vegans", adding: "I get it, you're all hangry. I would be too if I only ate plants and gruel."

Another Twitter user said: "I really struggle to believe that 20,000 vegans are that desperate to eat in a Greggs."

"You don't paint a mustach (sic) on the Mona Lisa and you don't mess with the perfect sausage roll," one quipped.

Journalist Nooruddean Choudry suggested Greggs introduce a halal steak bake to "crank the fume levels right up to 11".

The bakery chain told concerned customers that "change is good" and that there would "always be a classic sausage roll".

It comes on the same day McDonald's launched its first vegetarian "Happy Meal", designed for children.

The new dish comes with a "veggie wrap", instead of the usual chicken or beef option.

It should be noted that Piers Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm, so I'm thinking this is some serious faux outrage and South Park KKK gambiting here.

 

[Alpahrius Omegon]

Gen Z is split into two camps, DEI fag and racist. Boomers used to have more camps with some being more progressive, some being skinheads and some being racist in the "them brown people look funny" kind of way. Gen Alpha will have to grow up in the world where the brown people are socially in control. Gen Alpha will be racist as fuck in the good old fashioned disgusted with brown people kinda way. The browns we have in the country right now are stupid and lazy as shit and won't be much good in a war. Take of that what you will. The culture war has to be won before the economic war. Solve the nigger question then the economic one.

This was edited several times because I'm a new fag and don't know how much Qanon tier posting is allowed on the farms.

 

[The Gene Genie]

Pollster James Johnson is shocked to find out that people in Grimsby are not happy about the state of the nation:
(L / A)

James Johnson: pollster’s thoughts on political swing in UK​

Running focus groups across America for the last two years, James Johnson has become used to eye-popping discussions. When he travels to England, he can usually count on a gentler ride, but the picture that met him in Grimsby, conducting a focus group on behalf of Channel 4 News, could not have been more different.

By James Johnson, a pollster and political advisor, giving his personal reflections on a focus group conducted for Channel 4 News.
Running focus groups across America for the last two years, I have become used to eye-popping discussions. Conspiracies, polarisation, raised voices: I have heard it all.

When I travel to England I can usually count on a gentler ride. Politics in Britain is less fighting in the trenches, more a natter over a cup of tea. Less a shout of fury at politicians, more a tut and a roll of the eyes.

The picture that met me in Grimsby, conducting a focus group on behalf of Channel 4 News, could not have been more different.

The former fishing town, won by Boris Johnson in 2019 and wrestled back by Labour in 2024, perches on the edge of the North Sea. It is one of the ninety seats where Reform UK is second to Labour.

I spoke to two groups of people. The first voted Labour in 2024 but now lean to Nigel Farage’s party. The second – like many across the country – did not vote at all last year. These voters’ backgrounds ranged from an Afghanistan veteran to a retiree, from a carer to a stay-at-home mum recovering from depression.

Their outlook for the country was nothing short of apocalyptic. They spoke of hundreds of homeless Britons on the streets, while “floods” of illegal migrants are housed in hotels on the taxpayer. A carer spoke of children hobbled with mental health problems, the long hangover of the Covid pandemic still biting. The stay-at-home mum talked of criminals and junkies living above her, with politicians and local police powerless to stop them.

Not one of the Labour voters could name an achievement by the party they voted for. The most recalled action was Labour’s cutting of the winter fuel allowance, described as punishing Brits to siphon more money to immigration. The non-voting group spurned the election deliberately, feeling there was no option that represented them. The mainstream parties’ alien values had pushed them away: “there’s no democracy in the UK anymore”.

The government’s handling was “disgraceful”, “disgusting”, “managed decline”. Britain was described as “losing everything that made us great”. Some even spoke of the possibility of violence, a “civil war”, a “revolution”.

Immigration was at its core, with high numbers of legal and illegal migration seen to be “diluting” British culture and the “indigenous people” of the country. In this context, Keir Starmer’s welfare cuts were seen as an insult to Britain’s poorest while the money kept flowing to those crossing the channel on small boats.

They had made themselves heard in 2016 by voting for Brexit, excitedly backed Johnson in 2019, were now counting on Labour, and have felt nothing has gotten better since.

It was not just the anger that made this the most American of the English focus groups I have run. Conspiracy theories abounded: Epstein and a shady force “pulling the strings” featured. People often shouted over each other. Anti-Ukraine sentiment was common, with anti-Zelenskyy talking points cutting through to these Grimsby residents.

What of the party leaders? Keir Starmer was derided. Kemi Badenoch is off the map in a seat her party won just six years ago. She is written off as unexceptional and middle-of-the-road, “a cat’s eye that hasn’t lit up”. Even Nigel Farage was seen as an “old timer”, too tainted by his time in politics to be the fresh face they yearn for.

But push come to shove, Nigel Farage was their top choice for Prime Minister. Most of the voters in the room said they had moved more to the right – and Farage – in recent years because of the state of the country. All but one of the sixteen people we interviewed agreed that “Britain first” should be the guiding principle of politicians.

As I trailed my way back to Heathrow the next morning, the station café worker recommends a podcast with Liz Truss about how the Bank of England was really behind her demise. On the Tube in London I overhear a conversation about “two-tier policing”.

Our focus groups in Grimsby and these encounters do not sum up everyone in the country. But bit by bit, our politics is becoming more online, more conspiratorial, more fractious, more American.

Leaving Grimsby is the most dejected I have ever felt after a focus group. My colleague in tow was more optimistic; he saw great political opportunity, with the voters not resigned to decline but desperate for change.

I am not so sure. There was no excitable revolutionary fervour crackling over the roofs of Grimsby on Monday evening. It was a howl of anguish.

Incredibly remarkable, if nothing else. Random people spouting to Channel 4 that migrants - including the legal ones - are diluting the blood of the indigenous people, and that the country is on the brink of civil war.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

View attachment 7112852

You're once again not wrong but that doesn't make you any less demoralized, unsure if reading anything you post counts as a cognitohazard TBH.

Only if you don't take a step back and realize what's going on here. "Fuck the younger generation, fuck the olds, I got mine... wait why does this country suck?"

 

[isalaide]

Only if you don't take a step back and realize what's going on here. "Fuck the younger generation, fuck the olds, I got mine... wait why does this country suck?"

It is not my wish for this country to become a second world shithole where the circumstances of your birth essentially guarantee your life outcomes, for better or worse. A country where the only real determinant between wealth and being a fucking peasant is blind luck is fucking dystopian. That is genuine middle ages shit. The idea that that is coming to pass frightens the absolute fuck out of me. Places like that are shit for everyone, even if they have been lucky enough to be born to privilege. Those are inherently shitty unstable violent banana republics. That is not the future I want for this country. That is going to suck more dicks than Bonnie Blue and it is not in the interests of anyone living in this country for that to happen.
I have my ears open for a plan to forestall this. I don't hear any fucking plan coming from anywhere, and that's why I feel we are fucked. I don't even mean a plan for the future of some specific 'political' flavour. I mean literally any cunt with a half organised idea of what to do. The current government have noticed we are in shit creek and are cutting all the liabilities of the welfare state like someone who just got their P45 cancelling all their direct debits in a panic. That's not a plan, that's just a reaction. Everyone can tell they don't know what to do next.
There is no plan at HMGov or anywhere else to do anything to change the course of UK plc. That is what worries me. It's not even "there is no alternative". No cunt has even thought up anything to have an alternative to. And there isn't some infinite amount of time to attempt a course correction before the structural rot becomes near impossible to break.
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. Next week in terms of the history of the UK is knocking on the door, and there isn't even a bad plan on the table to execute. Before Something Must Be Done, some cunt has to figure out what the Something is.

 

[Tony Martin's Force Ghost]

@teriyakiburns Interesting read, thank you. Funnily enough, Betz's prediction is a hybrid of the dirty wars. I think it will evolve into an enormous Troubles.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

I have my ears open for a plan to forestall this. I don't hear any fucking plan coming from anywhere, and that's why I feel we are fucked.

The funny thing is, I agree with you: by all indications thr system is hopelessly inert and run by and for vested interests who have no plan or vision beyond a comfortable glide path into oblivion. Like the Germans, your politics are stuck in the past, in complete thrall tobthe war that ruined you. The only potential shake up i see in the next four years is if Starmer actually gets the war with Russia he's slouching towards.

But what's stopping you from being the change you want to see in the world? If there's no solutions and no hope, why not abandon the sinking ship for someplace with better prospects?

 

[Smyrna]

The funniest part of the C4 focus group was the lady who had no idea who Badenoch was and obviously put her rosette to the left of Mao based entirely on the colour of her skin.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Incredibly remarkable, if nothing else. Random people spouting to Channel 4 that migrants - including the legal ones - are diluting the blood of the indigenous people, and that the country is on the brink of civil war.

It's something I've not seen before, not at this level. You can feel the resentment building everywhere, with every new thing the government does. It was one thing when the tories did shit, because that's just what tories do, but there was an expectation that something would change once Labour got in, even if most people didn't actually vote for them. Instead, Labour have doubled down on all the worst tory policies and added a few pile more of their own, while very openly trying to roll back brexit, the one big change people felt they had actually had a direct involvement in achieving. Voters have tried being polite and conciliatory with the new lot, after the ructions last year and the years of Tory graft, and Starmer spat in their faces. Now they're angry.

If there's no solutions and no hope, why not abandon the sinking ship for someplace with better prospects?

There's always hope. If nothing else, there's the hope that westminster will collapse back into the pits of hell from which it was spawned and take all of them with it.

 

[Otterly]

As much as I dislike Andrew Tate, directly name-dropping him in the film as absolutely laughable.

I don’t like Tate, and at the same time I’m thinking can’t you sue for that? Implying a living person made someone kill on a mass media drama? That’s libel or slander or something surely?

Pollster James Johnson is shocked to find out that people in Grimsby are not happy about the state of the nation:

Every single one of our ruling class should be made to live in Grimsby on benefits in the winter in a flat with junkie scum below and migrants above.

It is not my wish for this country to become a second world shithole where the circumstances of your birth essentially guarantee your life outcomes, for better or worse.

But that’s what’s going to happen unless we give the British poor better chances. We have to sort schools out. We have to have a safety net and we HAVE to have that ladder. The future otherwise is the workhouse / feudal serf one. Only browner

 

[A-Logato]

It's something I've not seen before, not at this level. You can feel the resentment building everywhere, with every new thing the government does. It was one thing when the tories did shit, because that's just what tories do, but there was an expectation that something would change once Labour got in, even if most people didn't actually vote for them. Instead, Labour have doubled down on all the worst tory policies and added a few pile more of their own, while very openly trying to roll back brexit, the one big change people felt they had actually had a direct involvement in achieving. Voters have tried being polite and conciliatory with the new lot, after the ructions last year and the years of Tory graft, and Starmer spat in their faces. Now they're angry.

It is actually quite amazing how much resentment almost everyone has outside the most left wing labour die hard's at this point. I visited my mother recently and they had BBC news on the TV and there must have been a segment about Ukraine on because all I heard was my mum yell "another 20 billion for Ukraine then?!", she's not even a political person and rarely gets worked up about such things but that really struck a nerve with her.

Everything has gotten so much worse, my home town is pretty much devoid of whites and crimes through the roof to such an extent that we've had to tell my elderly Grandmother that she can't be going down there any more after a mass spree of muggings aimed at old people but were simply not allowed to talk about it in fear of the police coming around and dragging one of us away. IMO give it 3 years and people are going to blow.

 

[isalaide]

But what's stopping you from being the change you want to see in the world? If there's no solutions and no hope, why not abandon the sinking ship for someplace with better prospects?

My father in law gets ever more beguiling with his campaign to sell up everything and have us all decamp to the old country. We have the passports. The life would be more rural but in the nice on TV move to the country way. There is extended family there, we'd do well, it's a beautiful part of the world. We would hardly be going far. The kids are young enough and resilient enough to manage just fine. It's not like I have anything to leave behind here.

But I don't want to be a foreigner. Yeah yeah I'd only be a bit of a foreigner, it's not like I'm brown, I have the magic passport blah blah. But still. I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

It's stupid and it's not rational and at some point I will bow to the inevitable. I can't really explain my reluctance. I think if nigel was more into the idea we'd already have gone. I would be taking everything important to me in my life with me. The more I talk about it the stupider I sound for not having gone. I could even get those ducks I want.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I visited my mother recently and they had BBC news on the TV and there must have been a segment about Ukraine on because all I heard was my mum yell "another 20 billion for Ukraine then?!", she's not even a political person and rarely gets worked up about such things but that really struck a nerve with her.

Support for Ukraine was (posisbly still is) a fairly popular position, but Starmer latched on to that support to revive his political fortunes in such an obviously cynical way that it has made people instinctively oppose it just to spite him. I cannot express just how much I despise that vapid little twerp. I look forward to his eventual downfall.

 

[Special spoonie]

Who the fuck told the ginger woman to make these videos? Deaf awareness, right as they are cutting PIP for them probably. Yeah that will fix everything. Shouldn’t the deputy prime minister have more important things to do?

 

[Kane Lives]

My father in law gets ever more beguiling with his campaign to sell up everything and have us all decamp to the old country. We have the passports. The life would be more rural but in the nice on TV move to the country way. There is extended family there, we'd do well, it's a beautiful part of the world. We would hardly be going far. The kids are young enough and resilient enough to manage just fine. It's not like I have anything to leave behind here.

But I don't want to be a foreigner. Yeah yeah I'd only be a bit of a foreigner, it's not like I'm brown, I have the magic passport blah blah. But still. I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

It's stupid and it's not rational and at some point I will bow to the inevitable. I can't really explain my reluctance. I think if nigel was more into the idea we'd already have gone. I would be taking everything important to me in my life with me. The more I talk about it the stupider I sound for not having gone. I could even get those ducks I want.

You ever wonder this is how the more forward thinking Romans felt during the long managed decline of the Empire after the 3th century AD? And like the WRE, things will just continue until they disappear, and what's left of the apathetic citizens will shrug and let it stay rotting and forgotten

 

[teriyakiburns]

On an entirely different note: Bin strikes in brum are still ongoing. It's a big enough issue that the BBC has a live happenings page on it. (archive)

 

[Otterly]

On an entirely different note: Bin strikes in brum are still ongoing. It's a big enough issue that the BBC has a live happenings page on it. (archive)

View attachment 7114473

Large piles of rubbish in Birmingham? You don’t say

 

[A-Logato]

Support for Ukraine was (posisbly still is) a fairly popular position, but Starmer latched on to that support to revive his political fortunes in such an obviously cynical way that it has made people instinctively oppose it just to spite him. I cannot express just how much I despise that vapid little twerp. I look forward to his eventual downfall.

Well it was popular until Starmer decided to start giving away billions to Ukraine whilst at the same time cutting everything we had domestically because of an alleged black hole in finances and leaving the country to devolve until South Africa and finishing that off with threatening to ship off gen z to go die in a field somewhere in Eastern Europe because Starmer just couldn't stop antagonising Putin does tend to make peoples outlook on something to change.

 

[Cassius Crayfish]

I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

It's stupid and it's not rational and at some point I will bow to the inevitable. I can't really explain my reluctance.

Edmund Burke would approve. One needs no reason to hold onto a place other than that it is yours. You were put in that place, so you should want to conserve it because it is part of who you are and you are part of what it is. In that sense, our 'irrational' attachment to our places are not really that irrational at all. We were designed to feel such things.

 

[Goose the Redeemer]

On an entirely different note: Bin strikes in brum are still ongoing. It's a big enough issue that the BBC has a live happenings page on it. (archive)

Why are they just piling it up in the street, presumably in front of their own houses, and not taking it down to the local council office? People pay council tax for a reason, this is the council's problem.

---

Asim Iqbal also spoke to me and he said there was "mess and smells everywhere".
He said there were seven people living in his house [...]

But what about the rubbish piling up?

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

On an entirely different note: Bin strikes in brum are still ongoing. It's a big enough issue that the BBC has a live happenings page on it. (archive)

View attachment 7114473

Which are the photos of bin strikes? Because all I see is a white-washed version of Birmingham.

Edmund Burke would approve. One needs no reason to hold onto a place other than that it is yours. You were put in that place, so you should want to conserve it because it is part of who you are and you are part of what it is. In that sense, our 'irrational' attachment to our places are not really that irrational at all. We were designed to feel such things.

The agricultural revolution and the settling of societies began approx 12,000-14,000 years ago, if we go along with conventional wisdom.
For the time before that, some 300,000+ years, we were nomads. We travelled from Africa to the modern-day mideast, traversed the mountains, hills and dales of Europe. Spread far and wide to the orient and ventured across the Asian Steppes. We swam to Islands, then swam to some more islands.
We explored, conquered and surveyed every square inch of habitable, and often, inhabitable parts of the world. Then when we had accomplished that, we set our eyes on the stars and the skies.

To think that we should stay in one place for reasons, is a little silly. Ignoring the current climate, moving for work, a better life for you and your family, is a rational and sensible decision. None of us begrudge a dirt farmer from india moving to England to work hard, intigrate and settle with his family, knowing he can afford them a better, more comfortable and rewarding life.
Why should we begrudge ourselves the same luxuries? Because ol' blighty was once great?
What of those families of yesteryear who moved to Australia, New Zealand or Canada? We all know people who did. Are they wrong for moving while the country was good, or right for moving when the country was good because leaving when things are shit is bad?

If anything, the only real reason to stay in a failing country, especially if you offer a lot in the way of tax payments or employing staff, is to prop up the failing country. The pigs at the trough don't want you to stop bringing them slop, otherwise they will have to do it.

"Don't ask what you can do for you country. Ask what your country can do for you" - Dave Mustaine.