UK British News Megathread - aka CWCissey's news thread

https://news.sky.com/story/row-over-new-greggs-vegan-sausage-rolls-heats-up-11597679

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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Geoff Capes Vapes Apes said:
Great Britain is the only country to have developed an independent satellite launch capability then lost it (yet again, the yanks lied to us then reneged when we'd binned our project). We've designed and built ICBMs before, we can do it again
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Alex the ok has an interesting video on the British Space Program

Bog-standard Poster said:
We wouldn't necessarily need rockets to drop nukes. There's a recently decommissioned aerial weapons platform that was designed to drop nukes on Russia. Dozens of these still serviceable platforms are sitting around in bases all over the UK.
It would take months, at most, to have these birds flying again.
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Tornado?
 
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Guntsress Of Diabeteeze said:
10 years for how many rapes? Absolutely disgusting, though not surprising given his connections. If London allow China to build their “mega-embassy” then we will truly be fucked, if not more.
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He should be taken to a point about four nautical miles west of St. Kilda, dropped from a chopper and told to swim back to fucking china. In January.
 
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Turquoise said:
Limericks have 5 lines, with lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyming. For example:

We British pride ourselves on being free,
Say anything you want in front of me,
But not of races,
Or rape gang cases,
Or the daily dinghies arriving by sea.
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I got one but it's OT:

There once was a can called Dave,
Who dug up a prostitute's grave.
She was covered in shit,
And missing a tit,
But think of the money he saved.

In case anyone needed a laugh today :)
 
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£1bn cuts to hospitals and schools to fund pay rises for doctors and teachers​

Rachel Reeves has cut up to £1.4bn in spending for modernising schools and hospitals to pay for her pay deal with trade unions, it can be revealed.

According to Treasury documents seen by The i Paper, money earmarked for “capital expenditure” used to improve medical and education facilities is being used to help fund the multi-billion-pound pay deals Reeves made shortly after Labour took office.

Although it is not known precisely what the money was earmarked for apart from building work, cuts could relate to MRI machines, CT scanners, and other expensive diagnostic equipment.

In July, Reeves agreed a 5.5 per cent pay rise for teachers and an average 4.05 per cent pay rise for doctors.

The disclosure comes as Reeves battles to balance the books and grow the economy, amid demands for increase in defence expenditure ahead of her spending review later this month.

Shadow education minister Neil O’Brien criticised the Government for cutting critical building programmes to prioritise pay deals.

He said: “Rather than investment, the Government has chosen to prioritise short-termist savings to fund the pay deal with unions….. Rather than being up front about it they have snuck it out in the hope no one would notice”.

According to the spending documents, £575m worth of cuts were made to capital budgets for academies and local authority grants to schools.

In addition, part of an £880m fund for hospital buildings and medical equipment was “reprioritised to cover NHS pay”.

Sally Gainsbury, of health think tank Nuffield Trust, said Reeves’s decision to use hospital infrastructure money to meet pay demands raised was “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

She added: “Moving up to £1.4bn away from capital spending to fund the public-sector pay deals raises questions about Rachel Reeves’s dedication to her new fiscal rules – which forbids the Government from borrowing for day-to-Cday spending – if the result is money being moved away from infrastructure spending.”

Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers said the cuts would have an impact on care for patients and on NHS productivity.

NHS Providers represents the trusts and other organisations that are responsible for providing care.

Cordery said: “If we want to improve patient care and boost productivity, we need significantly more capital investment in the NHS alongside wider reforms including a shift to providing more care closer to home.

“Old, crumbling buildings, facilities, and equipment well past their sell-by date hamper care for patients. Much of the NHS estate is in a bad way. We need modern, safe places where staff can give patients first-class care in hospitals, mental health, community and ambulance services.”

Luke Sibieta, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said shifting money from capital budgets to day-to-day spend “can often be attractive in the short run, but can make it harder to deliver long-run plans to rebuild”.

In September, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson criticised the Conservative record on school infrastructure, describing “schools literally crumbling round the next generation, children cowering under steel props, to stop the roof falling in on their heads.”.

The cash was moved despite repeated pledges by Labour during the general election campaign to prioritise infrastructure. However, since then, severe budget constraints have grown tighter because of expensive pay deals designed to avoid continued public-sector strikes.

A Department for Education spokesperson admitted that some projects would be delayed but denied new school building has been affected.

They said: “School building programmes have not been cut as a result of the teacher pay deal, and our investment ambition for the school estate remains unchanged.

“Recruiting and keeping great teachers in our classrooms is a priority as we know they are the key to ensuring all children achieve and thrive.

“Despite the challenging economic context, in July we confirmed a 5.5 per cent pay award for teachers and provided almost £1.1bn in additional funding for schools.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “The Government has inherited unprecedented challenges, with crumbling public services and a £22bn black hole in the public finances, but our Plan for Change will deliver a decade of national renewal and get the NHS back on its feet.

“We have already delivered pay rises for over 1.5 million NHS staff and ended devastating strike action by resident doctors that carried immense costs to patients, staff, and the taxpayer.”
 
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teriyakiburns said:
Something a lot of people are surprised to learn is that our trident warheads are designed and built in the UK, though allegedly their design is based on an older US design. They're built and maintained at a facility in Aldermaston. The UK has somehow held on to its nuclear weapons knowledge, despite cancelling most of its nuclear weapons development, so the only real issue is the actual rocket, which theoretically shouldn't be that expensive. The main issue would be whether we could convincingly pretend our Trident clone was an indigenous design.
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The UK does share it's warhead design with the US but they are from design to production as British as they are American. Most of the warhead development comes from just getting hold of enough weapons grade uranium and plutonium. Nuclear power plants are the most economical of sourcing weapons grade nuclear material. Any nation with nuclear power plants that it owns and operates is basically a nuclear threshold state for that fact alone. So the UK is always going to have access to nukes in one form or another.

teriyakiburns said:
* the missile not being fueled
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Trident D5's are solid fuelled rockets. I'm pretty sure that means that they are full fuelled once manufactured. Solid rockets have a ton of pros and make sense for a missile system but they are notorious for being a pain. If I remember correctly at least one failure was due to the testing equipment.

teriyakiburns said:
What this highlights is a need to ramp up our own missile development, rather than being reliant on the Americans for the rockets. If we're building our own rockets, then at least we know who to blame when something goes wrong.
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I fully agree. I would go as far as saying that the UK needs to gain fully independent access to space. We're making some steps towards that with a few British space launch companies with domestic rockets testing the waters and the SaxaVord space port but the government doesn't seem too interested in throwing it's weight behind British space.

I feel like this country is cursed to forever commit the same mistakes. We once had a massive aerospace sector that we just left to die on the grapevine. I understand why it happened but we didn't need to full gut the industry.

Bog-standard Poster said:
We wouldn't necessarily need rockets to drop nukes. There's a recently decommissioned aerial weapons platform that was designed to drop nukes on Russia. Dozens of these still serviceable platforms are sitting around in bases all over the UK.
It would take months, at most, to have these birds flying again.
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Making a new solid fuelled rocket and integrating that to the Vanguard/Dreadnought class launching system can be done relatively cheaply. Especially since we already have Trident II to take inspiration from. We're still talking billions but most of the ground work on rocketry was done in the 50's and is pretty much open source at this point. Whether the UK can keep to a budget or timescale is a different question

Nigger rigging a warhead to a jet is possible but it's hardly as proper deterrence. Deterrence can only be achieved if you can credibly threaten multiple population centres and military bases at the same time. SLBM's are simply the beast way to do that.
 
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My uncle is in desperate need of a liver transplant (without one he is dead within a year) and the specialist hospital is in Birmingham, he went there some time ago for some blood tests and had to go back the other day top get the results, in order to get there on time he has to leave south-west Wales at 3AM and when he did it turns out the SPECIALIST hospital did the wrong blood tests.

British healthcare best in the world!
 
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WEEKEND said:
We're making some steps towards that with a few British space launch companies with domestic rockets testing the waters and the SaxaVord space port
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You have no idea the Arthur Dent levels of pissed off I was to find the perfect QUIET village with great prices and beautiful views to live in with a bungalow with a great workshop on the side, enough land for crops and chickens and then they decided to place a spaceport 1 fucking!!!!! Mile from it.
 
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Chunky Salsa said:
I have been forced to go to an NHS minor injuries unit to get stitches. The GP receptionists said they 'don't deal with medical issues' there, so MIU it is. Five hours I've been waiting. I might just go home and accept the ugly scar. Fucking insane.
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At least you have one nearby. We should have a really robust layer of this kind of stuff, it’d take the pressure off GPs and emergency alike. Instead GPs won’t touch you and everything thing ends up getting triaged through AandE. Plus it’s Friday evening so in about three hours you’re going to see the people around you change from slips trips and falls to drunken/junkie idiots. It sucks so much. This is one place I think a private option would be useful. In most euro countries you can pay fifty euro, and take a ticket and be seen for stitches or a sore thrust pretty fast.
Eekum Bokum said:
it turns out the SPECIALIST hospital did the wrong blood tests.
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Sorry to hear it. Disgraceful.
PALS. Get them involved.
 
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