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.

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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.

 

[Heinrich Maneuver]

A pint of ordinary milk cost 10d (but Jersey milk cost a whole shilling). A shop couldn't charge more for it, a shopkeeper caught breaking this law (remember, an era of small shopkeepers) faced a hefty fine and up to three years in prison.

Paki shopkeepers break the law every fucking day and the police don't do shit. This post has been doing the rounds from reddit since the HMRC crackdowns were announced. Legal, British shops will be raped into the dirt over price caps, 'mini-marts' will continue like nothing happened.


Duncan Bannatyne has come out in support of Restore in the by election after Andy Burnham confirmed that he would allow transwomen (men) to use single-sex female spaces. A lot of conflicting reports on how Restore is doing so far. Lowe has been posting policy papers, with the energy paper out today (pdf) which I will try read through and take notes on later with a cuppa.

 

[BongoMongo]

Foreigners and immigrants shouldn't be allowed to own businesses or property. If you watch any of those shows like call the bailiffs or nightmare tenants, slum landlords, the overwhelming majority of people in the wrong on there are not white British.

This puts insane pressure on the already overburdened court system. It causes misery for decent people. It's not worth the hassle, they can't be trusted and they don't deserve the same rights as us because fundamentally they are not the same as us. Change my mind, Reddit!

 

[Otterly]

Anyway, it's new, it's weird, it does get in the milk and I trust it not in the slightest. Someone else could give you a better more detailed analysis on the medical side.

It’s toxic to cows and it’s pointless for climate emissions anyway because cow farts are a short term cycling thing.
The bovaer needs to be handled with full PPE, and it makes cows sick.
Would you like a full sperg post on it?

 

[teriyakiburns]

Lowe has been posting policy papers, with the energy paper out today (pdf) which I will try read through and take notes on later with a cuppa.

Our overall system diagnosis is that Britain today cannot convert resources into energy because we optimise for risk aversion, not output. We are governed by institutions that put process before delivery and compliance before capacity. Projects get delayed beyond their economic life, investors cannot count on stable returns, and regulatory layers multiply without accountability.

Yet energy usage is the best proxy we have for real industrial capability. It measures the part of the economy that deals with the world of atoms rather than the world of bytes. If anything, we ought to regard kWh per capita divided by the cost per kWh as a more meaningful metric of national capability than GDP per capita. This would put China already ahead of the United States and even further ahead of us.

Off to a good start in the philosophy section. Diagnosis of the underlying problem and a big-picture proposal that actually makes a great deal of sense.

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

Off to a good start in the philosophy section. Diagnosis of the underlying problem and a big-picture proposal that actually makes a great deal of sense.

I had to look it up and according to Google the last power plant was opened in ‘16 and the last nuclear was in ‘95.

Population has gone up 4million since ‘16 and 11 million since ‘95.

 

[Overly Serious]

Leftists hold all the power

Fuck Leftists.

 

[LongDayAgain]

Wow, powerful.

 

[AssignedEva]

Labour really aren't doing themselves any favours with this. After 14 years in opposition, they could dismiss suggestions that they would implement policies like price fixing and rent caps as scaremongering. But they've been in for only two years and they're already resorting to literal commie shit that has been proven time and again not to work.

Eh, the Post-War Consensus wasn't Communism. It was a mix of Capitalism and Socialism.

This specific era was dominated by stop-go policies. An oversimplified definition of money based on my limited understanding:

Spoiler

Gold standard
£1 = 1lb of gold. If you want more money, you can either adjust this ratio (weakening buying power) or get more gold. If some sort of Great War happens and you need to pay for ships and soldiers, you can't just get more gold, so you have to either weaken the Sterling (which makes everything less affordable for people). If some sort of Great Depression happens, you cannot easily get more money so you can't do much about unemployment.

Interwar Fiat
£1 = how much we say it is. People can buy and sell stirling under our control, which impacts the Sterling's value. However if it starts getting crazy, we can restrict supply of stirling or alternatively make more stirling. However other countries can do that too in order to make their exports more competitive, so it's really unstable and volatile.

Bretton-Woods
£1 =$2 = 1lb of gold. We can't control the ratio of USD to gold or the ratio of the Sterling to USD, and are basically forced into it because we owe the US a load of money from WWII and our country is fucked. But everyone is either linked to USD or linked to a currency linked to USD so there's not much movement in exchange rates.

Under Bretton-Woods if we our economy did too well (so people had £££), we struggled to afford imports (more demand but we couldn't pay for them with our exports/USD). A bit part of why the 50s were the "good old days" in the US while we still had rationing. So we really needed to control inflation. Thus there was a real force to link wage growth only to productivity growth to prevent a wage-price inflationary spiral, which wage and price boards tried to do (there were also wage councils, which evolved out of trade councils, and e.g. required a hairdresser to be paid a certain minimum wage long before there was a "minimum wage").

Anyway the Conservatives argued it'd be better to manage inflation through industrial negotiation and market forces, so they did that, immediately caused an inflationary crisis and then ran smack into the oil shock, so had to bring back a lot of these measures alongside stuff like the Three Day Week.


These sort of measures don't make a load of sense in a globalised economy with a floated fiat currency. So the options really are something more like:

• Everything gets way more expensive and poorer people go without
• The Government sets mandatory price caps, devalues the Stirling and causes a load of supermarkets to go bankrupt, causing mass shortages
• The Government asks really nicely if Supermarkets can do voluntary price caps in exchange for not making them pay some extra planned taxes (but that reduces tax income which throws the buget out of wack) <-- you are here
• The Government borrows loads of money and gets into way more expensive debt that will make it harder to borrow in future, in order to provide subsidies to certain industries/provide more gibs
• The Government slashes spending (they won't slash the things you want them to slash) and uses that for subsidies/gibs
• The Government reduces other stressors on the food supply chain and slashes regulations/taxes (which will make spending and borrowing harder)
• We do another Irish potato famine and somehow convince another country to give us all their food at a cheap price while their people suffer
• We rejoin the EU to make the previous bullet point easier
• We invent cold fusion, no longer have to worry about energy costs, and regain our position as the world's wealthiest superpower

I can't think of any others. Supply shocks have far less levers that just "oh no we're in a recession". I think Autumn is going to be really ugly. The winter wheat growing in our fields right now suffered from the fertiliser shortage and will be harvested under hugely inflated Diesel prices in July/August. Projections currently all assume Hormuz opens by the end of this month.

Edit: Apologies for the spelling errors, I am phoneposting while looking after a newborn because her Mum is in hospital and her Dad's a feckless cunt (who at least pays their bills).

 

[Otterly]

So bovaer is nasty stuff. It’s being forced hard - in Denmark for example farmers with over 50 cows have to feed it to their cows for at least 80 days a year or be fined. The stuff is supposed to reduce methane by up to 30%

Now; cows as you know are ruminants. They MUST have bacteria in their guts and stomachs to process their food, and the bacteria thus present also help to create some of the healthier components of milk. Bovaer messes with this, in ways which are not publicly available.

The makers claim that it breaks down completely in the gut and does not get into milk or meat. I have never seen any proof of that. But let’s say it doesn’t get into milk or meat- it must do a few things. It must alter the way the cows digestion works and it must get pooped out onto the earth. It’s also highly irritant to people handling it. Yet it’s put into feed …

So what does it do to bacteria in the soil? No public information. Is it toxic to anything else that it’s hit being in the soil, like insects or the birds that feed on them? No information. What happens when a cows digestion is out of whack? No information!

But what farmers do report is sick cows. Now dairy farmers take very good care of their cows. They are extremely well looked after. Modern dairy farms are VERY high tech. Each cow has a little collar that allows her movement to be tracked. She comes I to the spotlessly clean milking area, is washed, milked and sent on her way and her health is monitored closely. Any fever is noted and so are what’s called somatic cells in milk - this is basically like a readout of ill health. Bit like how you get a white cell increase when poorly, cows get white cells and rpthelisl cells in milk. Remember the function of milk is to feed a baby and also impart antibodies - when you’re sick, the breast/udder actually samples what in your blood and creates antibodies to it and changes the composition of the milk too. So…Under 100000 cells/ml is healthy. 200 up is an issue, 400 up is unfit for human consumption. Bovaer gives cows a high fever and ups somatic cell count. That is not good.

As anyone who’s ever breastfed a baby knows, if you’re sick, the milk tastes off and the baby can even refuse it. It’s interesting @Overly Serious you say you can taste it, I bet you can.

At the very best case it seems to affect the taste of the milk, and the health of the cow. If it’s altering the way the gut works it WILL alter the composition of the milk.

As a reminder - the high fat parts of milk are the healthy parts. Drink full fat milk.

At the moment (or last time I checked) it’s not organic compatible so any organic milk should be ok but the uk soil association seems to be pushing it (argh) so I’m not sure how long that will last.

Use only organic dairy where you can.

 

[femboy fart huffer]

So what does the government plan to do? Squash every tiny variation in quality into some price-fixed lowest common denominator? How does this work in Scotland where they apparently already have price controls?

Hey look it might be fucking retarded to anyone with a brain but think on the bright side of life. At least they didn't say they're just going to print more money and give everyone some. Because it would not have surprised me.

They've already made all produce essentially free by basically making shoplifting legal anyway. The price cap is just how much you can carry in one arm.

 

[Clem Fandango]

These sort of measures don't make a load of sense in a globalised economy with a floated fiat currency. So the options really are something more like:

It seems like you know a lot more about economics than me, but surely "produce more milk" is something you should do if you want to lower the price of milk? I unno, maybe that's covered under "reduce stressors", I don't really know what that means.

Duncan Bannatyne has come out in support of Restore in the by election after Andy Burnham confirmed that he would allow transwomen (men) to use single-sex female spaces.

I always knew he was the best Dragon.

 

[Kofi Drinka]

Fuck Leftists.

I would rather not fuck people who would murder my unborn child.

Everything gets way more expensive and poorer people go without

Am I the only person who thinks we've got to get people to be poor again and not have everyone larping as the middle class? You see working class kids and they have a tablet from 2 years old, a phone at 8 and a laptop at 10. And I'm thinking that's just too much tech and too much money being pissed away. Every family has 1 or even 2 phones per person. They have tablets each and probably a games console on top. I understand needing tech to function in the modern world but it's so much tech all at once. People are all living like they're rich, trying to travel the world, have all the tech and have constant take aways and they refuse to accept anything less. I know there are poor people who are struggling, but a lot of the people I see saying they're struggling aren't trying to live within their means. Poor people making poor decisions with money isn't new, but the amount of tech they consume is.

@Clem Fandango The problem with produce more milk is there's costs involved. How many cattle can you actually store and how much milk can you store and transport. Where is the money coming from for expansion when super markets are crushing your bottom line with "take it or enjoy your rotten milk"?

 

[Clem Fandango]

@Clem Fandango The problem with produce more milk is there's costs involved. How many cattle can you actually store and how much milk can you store and transport. Where is the money coming from for expansion when super markets are crushing your bottom line with "take it or enjoy your rotten milk"?

Alright, alright. I remember my GCSE economics. I'll take it from the other end and reduce demand by deporting 10 million people of colour. Problem solved.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

I got a kick out of this guy.

 

[BrightonAndHoveAlbion]

Regarding Bovaer - this article on Yeo Valley's website explains ot isn't compatible with organic certification and they categorically won't be using it:

https://www.yeovalley.co.uk/blog/does-yeo-valley-use-feed-additives

They also supply Arla organic milk as well as most of the supermarket own brand organic dairy, plus they are family owned which is always nice.

 

[Clem Fandango]

They also supply Arla organic milk as well as most of the supermarket own brand organic dairy, plus they are family owned which is always nice.

They're great. You can also visit their HQ and eat in the canteen. The food is really good, and lovely views of the valley.

 

[Deke Rivers]