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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.

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

#VEGANsausageroll thanks Greggs
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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.
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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.
 
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One of the slimiest articles I've seen out of the Guardian in a while.
Penny Lancaster was 50 when she retrained as a special constable. Wrangling Saturday night drunks and shoplifters might seem an odd fit for the ex-model and wife of Sir Rod Stewart; she got the idea after making a Channel 4 show in which she temporarily swapped jobs with a police officer. But to Lancaster, who has previously disclosed that she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by a senior figure in the fashion industry, it makes perfect sense: she has said her weekly shifts with City of London police are a way of dealing with things that happened to her as a younger woman, where “the suspects never got found, justice was never had”.
Buried memories have a habit of resurfacing in middle age. But with them sometimes comes a fierce urge to be useful: to make changes in your working life while there’s still time, look out for other people’s kids now your own are nearly grown and pass on life lessons you didn’t realise at the time were valuable. On a policing podcast recently, Lancaster talked about drawing on her experience as a mother of teenagers to talk down a suicidal 19-year-old who approached her on a bridge. Not everything in policing, she pointed out, is about chasing bad guys down the street. Steadiness, patience and emotional maturity matter too.

All of which makes her an interesting choice to serve on a new commission set up by the rightwing Centre for Social Justice thinktank examining what it calls “a midlife crisis for the economy”, or its reckoning that 2.15 million men and women aged 50 to 64 are now on out-of-work benefits.
You’d never know it from headlines about gen Z supposedly being too anxious to work, but the middle-aged with their dodgy knees, backs or hearts still make up a significant chunk of those on sickness benefits. (They’re also the age group acutely vulnerable to being pushed out of work by someone else – an elderly parent, or a teenage child in crisis – falling sick.) Rising claims have gone hand in hand with a rising retirement age, especially for women, suggesting a lot of people just aren’t making it to a more demanding new finish line.
Talk of government crackdowns forcing the sick back to work, meanwhile, is especially frightening to older people because it doesn’t acknowledge the odds they’re up against: not just chronic pain or debilitating symptoms – including, for some women, menopause-related symptoms they never expected to push them out of jobs they loved – but employers who just can’t seem to see them as capable of learning something new. Lancaster says she meets too many frustrated women who “feel pushed aside in midlife when they still have so much to contribute”. It’s hard enough to find the energy to start over from scratch when the job you’ve always done becomes impossible for health reasons, without being treated as a doddery inconvenience.
Though the UK government certainly hasn’t ignored older workers – it has already legislated to make employers support their staff better through menopause, while the former John Lewis boss Sir Charlie Mayfield is heading a taskforce on getting the long-term sick back to work – that’s not quite the same as making people feel instinctively that you get it.
Younger women, wary of being pushed back into the kitchen by a rightwing government, increasingly seem to feel that the Greens are fighting their corner. (One of the brand-new Gorton and Denton MP Hannah Spencer’s most-liked Instagram posts was a happy Valentine’s Day picture of her walking her dogs, talking about how proud she was of the life she’d built at a time when “childless women like me are under attack” from Reform politicians obsessed with pushing up the birthrate.) But women over 55 still feature in mainstream political conversation mostly when being labelled as Terfs and reactionaries, or else as smug boomers who don’t know how lucky they are. Meanwhile Reform has made inroads into the middle-aged female vote over the last year, peddling a relentless diet of fearmongering over immigrants and crime.
Inevitably, given the result of the Gorton and Denton byelection, a battle royal now looms inside Labour over whether to tack closer to the Greens or double down on the Reform UK tribute act, as if those were the only available choices. (I’ve made the case before for Labour taking its Green rivals more seriously, but in practice Keir Starmer’s options may be narrowing anyway: some of home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s more hardline ideas on immigration, including making refugee status temporary, look likely to provoke considerable resistance within the party.)
But to think only in such narrow ideological terms about how to get your lost, angry people back is to miss the fact that anger doesn’t always have particularly ideological roots or answers – Spencer’s lament in her victory speech about how “working hard used to get you something” but doesn’t any more could have been made from pretty much anywhere on the political spectrum. What’s more, even ageing Reform voters don’t care solely about immigration. The original insight behind the so-called “hero voter” strategy, targeting the mostly older people Labour lost in 2019, was that most of them just want a decent job, prompt medical treatment if they need it and to feel they haven’t been forgotten. If a Labour government can’t tick those basic boxes, what’s the point?
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Yes they've spent 30-50 years paying into the system but they're basically identical to people who've decided to never work in their entire life and instead be subsidised by the tax payers right? Especially those that have travelled from other countries to do so.
 
Kofi Drinka said:
Then fuck off and don't come back again rather than telling us to vote the green party over Farage.
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I could kick that Warrick Davis PFP across 3 football fields with how much I hate I have in my heart right now.
If I were in a room with two bullets, a gun and had Zack Polanski and Farage to choose from. I'd let Farage have both. I hate traitors that much and N I G E L W A V E will actually kill the country dead.

If you ever say that you support Reform with a straight face, you ought to be kicked across 5 football fields, with a complementary fell for it again award after you land.
 
The Ghost of Sergei Witte said:
I could kick that Warrick Davis PFP across 3 football fields with how much I hate I have in my heart right now.
If I were in a room with two bullets, a gun and had Zack Polanski and Farage to choose from. I'd let Farage have both. I hate traitors that much and N I G E L W A V E will actually kill the country dead.

If you ever say that you support Reform with a straight face, you ought to be kicked across 5 football fields, with a complementary fell for it again award after you land.
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Very performative.
 
The proposed names the Government is considering calling its new towns
- Elizabethtown (after the Queen)
- Pankhurst (after suffragette Emmeline)
- Attleeton (after ex-PM)
- Athelstan (first King of England)
- Seacole (after nurse Mary)

I kind of like these, especially Athelstan and Seacole. It's a shame that 4 in 10 new houses go directly to migrants : ) I think Nightingale (after Florence) and Anning (after Mary the fossil lady) could also be appropriate names to base towns/villages off. It's also interesting that historical figures are verboten for cash but not for towns.
Twitter users chipped in with suggestions; I'm partial to Saville City
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Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia (outside of their known range). The Yanks shot them down. This comes after the Iranian Foreign Minister warned that the UK was 'putting British lives in danger' and that Iran had the right of self defence; nevermind the fact that Iran attacked UK territory on Cyprus first, which under holy International Law TM gives us the right of defence first.
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Rumours that an energy bailout is coming
As the [Iran] conflict enters its fourth week, Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, are weighing up a series of measures to help families facing an inflation shock, including a potential multibillion-pound energy bill bailout.
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I walked past the faggy Lush signs today about how we shouldn't blame migrants for the NHS being privatised and underfunded, and then I realised, isn't the current asylum seeker system basically privatised? It's government contracts for 40, 80 million, to private companies to house and feed them in hotels; what makes asylum seeker privatisation okay and NHS privatisation not? (I hate both). And GOD that UK SNL ad is fucking disgraceful and looks AI generated yuck. I don't recognise a single ''comedian'' in the line up, and I'm actually shocked its majority white. I hope we get an actual sketch show soon : ( this thread had me rewatching Darkplace the other day, god comedy used to be good.
 
Heinrich Maneuver said:
Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia (outside of their known range). The Yanks shot them down. This comes after the Iranian Foreign Minister warned that the UK was 'putting British lives in danger' and that Iran had the right of self defence; nevermind the fact that Iran attacked UK territory on Cyprus first, which under holy International Law TM gives us the right of defence first.
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Since the UK can't decide if it is or isn't at war with Iran it seems fair we get randomly bombed. It's just to keep everyone on their toes in case we do decide to go to war, then do a 180 a week later.

'stan at the end of a place name says it all. Guess who's going to live there.
 
Heinrich Maneuver said:
Elizabethtown (after the Queen)
- Pankhurst (after suffragette Emmeline)
- Attleeton (after ex-PM)
- Athelstan (first King of England)
- Seacole (after nurse Mary)
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Seacole sounds lovely. Liz town and Attleeton sound like silly shit kids come up with when playing make-believe (do kids even do that stuff any more, or are they too busy being groomed on Minecraft?).

Athelstan? They really are taking the piss now, wanting to call a new town a -stan. Admitting it to the point of rubbing our noses in it.

Pankhurst sounds like a jail. One like a prisoner Cell Block H, full of angry butch lesbians.
 
UselessRubberKeyboard said:
Athelstan? They really are taking the piss now, wanting to call a new town a -stan.
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Feels like a reach. Athelstan was the first King of England, who united the anglo saxon kingdoms into a single nation for the first time. It's a bit lame to name towns after historical figures in general (that's something the Americans do), but it's at least appropriate to the country's history, and it does in some way acknowledge the English as a people, rather than as homogenous productivity units in an unbordered economic zone.
 
Terrorists win again
A civil case against Gerry Adams over three IRA bombings in Britain has been withdrawn.

A lawyer for the three claimants said on Friday that proceedings would be "discontinued" with "no order as to costs".

The victims who brought the case alleged that Adams, 77, was personally liable for injuries they received in IRA attacks in London and Manchester in 1973 and 1996.

The former Sinn Féin leader had insisted he had no role in the explosions and has strongly denied a claim that he was a "major player" in the IRA.
Anne Studd KC, for the victims, told the High Court that the development was "related" to an argument around "abuse of process".

At the end of the proceedings, the lawyer said that given the level of public interest in the trial, she wanted to set out the reasons for the decision.

But the judge said the court was not "an opportunity for a public statement".

Adams was not in court on Friday.

In a statement, he said he "welcomed the decision" and attended the case "out of respect" for the claimants.

The trial concluded after nine days of hearings before Mr Justice Swift at the High Court in London.

Adams' lawyers had argued the case was based on "an assortment of hearsay" and that it had been brought several decades too late.

They also suggested it had been taken as an abuse of legal process, and that the civil action was not about trying to prove liability for the three bomb attacks, but to try to establish a much wider process which "the court is not intended to perform or is equipped to perform".

During his two days on the witness stand, Adams faced an array of allegations from across several decades.

UK government memos, a letter from the US President Bill Clinton, and quotes from Irish ministers were put to him by the barrister for the bomb victims.

Adams: 'Nothing but sympathy for claimants'​

Speaking at a press conference in west Belfast, Adams added that the case should "never have been brought".

"I contested this case and defended myself against the smears and false accusations being levelled against me," he said.

"I asserted the legitimacy of the Republican cause and the right of the people of Ireland to freedom and self-determination. I do so again."

He also said he had "nothing but sympathy" for the claimants, and that he was moved by the testimonies of the two men who told of their own experiences.

"Family members of mine have been killed, I've been shot myself, so I know what it's like," Adams added.


Adams also said at times the case "verged upon a show trial".

"I said at the beginning of the trial, it clearly was an unorthodox and strategically important political case taken for that purpose - I don't fault the claimants for that," he said.

Due to the result of a pre-trial ruling, Adams is unable to recover his legal costs from the claimants, believed to be six figures.

He confirmed that he would be taking on the costs, adding: "I was never going to make an effort to burden the claimants with my legal bill."

What was the case about?​

Adams was being sued for "vindicatory" damages of £1 each by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, who were injured respectively in the Old Bailey attack in 1973, and the London Docklands and Manchester bombings in 1996.

The claimants raised more than £100,000 through crowdfunding to bring the case.

They said they were acting not just for themselves, but for all IRA victims.

Speaking on Friday, Barry Laycock said he was "completely devastated".

He added: "We can all hold our heads up high - our team have worked tirelessly and achieved something that successive governments have failed to do so - Adams's true self has been seen in court in all our evidence."

McCue Jury and Co, the solicitors for the claimants, said the men considered the case "a significant and legitimate attempt towards establishing the truth about responsibility for events during the Troubles".

The solicitors said: "The court unexpectedly directed at the final stages of the trial that it wished to consider whether the proceedings might amount to an abuse of process.

"The trial judge's decision to raise this issue, resulted, for the first time, in a real risk that the claimants, vulnerable victims of terrorism, could face devastating personal liability for legal costs as finding of abuse of process would remove the claimants' costs protection and require them to pay Mr Adams his full legal costs."

The lawyers said the claimants had "no realistic choice" but to settle, given they were "faced with even a small risk of life-changing financial consequences".

They added: "The claimants consider this deeply unfair."

The IRA was responsible for around 1,700 killings during the Troubles.

Adams was once charged with IRA membership in 1978, but the case was dropped due to insufficient evidence.

His only Troubles-era convictions, for twice attempting to escape prison while interned without trial in the mid-1970s, were quashed in 2020.

He has been questioned in court before about his alleged IRA past - at the Ballymurphy inquest in Belfast in 2019 and during a libel case against the BBC in Dublin last year.

Who is Gerry Adams?​

Adams was the former president of republican party Sinn Féin from 1983 until 2018.

He was elected as MP in his native west Belfast from 1997 until 2011, but Sinn Féin does not take its seats at Westminster due to the party's policy of abstentionism.

Adams sat as a TD (member of the Irish parliament) between 2011 and 2020.

He led the Sinn Féin delegation during peace talks that eventually brought an end to the Troubles after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

He was detained in the early 1970s when the government in Northern Ireland introduced internment without trial for those suspected of paramilitary involvement.

This was the first time that he had been questioned in a court in Great Britain about claims that he was a senior member of the IRA.

He has consistently denied being a member of the IRA.
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