Source

A former director at the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) was handed a role on an influential expert committee advising the UK government on cancer risks, the Observer can reveal.

Ruth Dempsey, the ex-director of scientific and regulatory affairs, spent 28 years at PMI before being appointed to the UK Committee on Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoC).

The committee’s role is to provide ministers with independent advice. Yet since taking up the position in February 2020, Dempsey has continued to be paid by PMI for work including authoring a sponsored paper about regulatory strategies for heated tobacco products.

She also owns shares in the tobacco giant – whose products include Marlboro cigarettes and IQOS heated tobacco sticks – and receives a PMI pension. On social media she continues to engage with senior staff at the company, including liking LinkedIn posts for the chief communications officer and the vice-president of public affairs.

There is no suggestion that Dempsey has acted improperly or failed to declare her interests, which are listed in committee documents. She said she had always complied with the rules and that her contributions to the CoC were based on her scientific training and “decades of experience in the field”. She also said she was “no longer a representative of the tobacco industry” given she had retired and had disclosed details of her career and financial interests during the application process.
[…]
Prior to Dempsey’s appointment, the CoC was involved in reviews of both e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products, two of PMI’s product lines.

Dempsey is believed to have been appointed to the committee following an evaluation and interview conducted by a three-person panel, including a Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) official, after stepping down from her full-time role with PMI to establish her own toxicology consultancy in the summer of 2019.
[…]
Dempsey said she was “very sorry if anyone feels that my presence on the committee is inappropriate”.

When she joined she did not have any active consultancy agreements with PMI but said the two she has had since had been properly declared. She also declared potential conflicts of interest when topics arose “that could be related to work I was doing as a consultant to any company”.

“In the five years that I have been a member there has been no topic related to tobacco products. If there had been, I certainly would declare my conflict of interest and would always follow the guidance of the committee chair regarding participation,” she said. She added that she had “never passed confidential or privileged information to PMI, and would certainly never do so”.

The government could offer its own low-cost baby formula under a brand such as the NHS to combat the high prices and lack of choice in the market, the UK competition watchdog has suggested.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said another “backstop” measure could be for the government to regulate and set a price or profit-margin cap on retailers as a way to bring prices down for parents more quickly.

The potential measures formed part of the CMA’s interim report on the infant formula market after the watchdog identified that a lack of competition in the market had led to soaring prices, taking advantage of an ingrained belief among parents that higher cost equates to better quality for their children.

The CMA report set out a number of potential recommendations including extending the ban on the advertising of infant formula to follow-on formula, or going as far as “prohibiting all brand-related advertising”.
[…]
The provisional findings, which will feed into a final report to be published early next year, include some backstop measures that the CMA said were not actively recommended but that the government could make “with the aim of bringing prices down directly”.

One option was for the government to procure its own infant formula from a third-party manufacturer at a competitive price and sell it under an established name, such as the NHS, or invest in creating a new brand for the market.
[…]
Another option is to introduce regulations to place a maximum price cap on baby and infant formula, or establish a profit-margin cap, which the Greek government did earlier this year with the aim of making products more affordable.

When he was a backbench MP in 2018, David Lammy described Trump as a "tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath".

But in his first interview since Trump's victory, he told the BBC's Newscast podcast the president-elect was "someone that we can build a relationship with in our national interest".

Lammy praised his election campaign as "very well run", adding that: "I felt in my bones that there could be a Trump presidency."
[…]
Pressed over whether he had changed his mind, Lammy said the remarks were "old news" and you would "struggle to find any politician" who had not said some "pretty ripe things" about Trump in the past.

"In that period, particularly with people on Twitter, lots of things were said about Donald Trump," he said.

"I think that what you say as a backbencher and what you do wearing the real duty of public office are two different things.

"And I am foreign secretary. There are things I know now that I didn't know back then."

Asked in if Trump brought up his previous comments when the pair met for dinner in New York in September, Lammy said: "Not even vaguely."

"I know this is a talking point today, but in a world where there's war in Europe, where there's a tremendous loss of life in the Middle East, where the US and the UK genuinely have a special relationship, where we got someone who's about to become again, the US president, who has experience of doing the job last time round, we will forge common interests," he said.

"We will agree and align on much and where we disagree, we'll have those conversations as well, most often in private."
[…]
But during the election campaign, [Trump] vowed to dramatically increase taxes, or tariffs, on foreign goods imported into the US.

Such a move could hit billions of pounds' worth of British exports, including Scotch whisky, pharmaceutical products, and airplane parts.

Asked if the UK would seek a special trade arrangement so there were no extra tariffs on British exports to the US, Lammy said: "We will seek to ensure and to get across to the United States, and I believe that they would understand this, that hurting your closest allies cannot be in your medium or long-term interests."

Lammy also said Trump was "correct" in his argument that Europe had fallen short on defence spending.

He called for a “clear” pledge from European governments to boosting military spending but could not say when the government would reach its target of spending 2.5% GDP on defence.

Real, btw

I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.

But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
[…]
Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.

In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.

That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server.

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
[…]
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.

That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.

Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.

A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

Joint Statement from left leaning politicians criticising the new Budget.

Labour’s first budget punishes the “working people” they claim to support. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised to deliver real change to the electorate, after 14 years of Tory rule. This week, they have broken that promise. This budget is austerity by another name.

While we welcome the government’s decision to invest in school and hospital buildings, it is extremely disappointing that these investments have been undermined by a swathe of public sector cuts, cruel attacks on the worst off, and a dogmatic refusal to redistribute wealth and power. These are not “tough choices” for government ministers, but for ordinary people who are forced to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table.

Labour is raising defence expenditure to 2.5% of GDP while telling us there is no money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is a lie. There is plenty of money – it’s just in the wrong hands. The richest 1% in the UK hold more wealth than 70% of Britons. By refusing to impose a wealth tax, this government has chosen to force vulnerable communities to pay the price for years of economic failure, instead of making the richest pay their fair share. Labour’s first budget shows us whose side they’re on.

Years of austerity and privatisation have decimated our public services and pushed millions into poverty, disproportionately impacting women, people of colour and disabled people. Making millions of children, working, retired and disabled people poorer damages our entire economy and stretches our public services. An austerity economy is a false economy.

We, along with nearly 100 progressive Independent and Green politicians across the country, are calling on the Labour government to: 1) introduce wealth taxes; 2) abolish the two-child benefit cap and stop attacking welfare recipients; 3) reverse cuts to winter fuel; 4) restore the £2 bus cap; and 5) invest in a Green New Deal.

We refuse to believe that child poverty, mass hunger and homelessness are inevitable in the sixth largest economy in the world. A progressive movement is growing up and down the country, demanding a real alternative to this race to the bottom between Labour and the Tories, which has seen the new government perpetuate decades of austerity and rampant corporate greed.

The Tories’ collapse allowed Labour to come to power with the lowest vote share ever won by any single-party majority government. Labour haemorrhaging votes to progressive independents and Greens in their heartlands should be a lesson to this government: you are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day – and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril.

-- Jeremy Corbyn MP Independent, Carla Denyer MP Green party co-leader, Adrian Ramsay MP Green party co-leader, Sian Berry MP Green party, Ben Lake MP Plaid Cymru, Ann Davies MP Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts MP Plaid Cymru, Llinos Medi MP Plaid Cymru, Zack Polanski Green party deputy leader and London assembly member, Leanne Mohamad Independent candidate for Ilford North, Jamie Driscoll Former North of Tyne mayor, Andrew Feinstein Former ANC MP and Independent candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, Leanne Wood Former leader, Plaid Cymru, Beth Winter Former Labour MP for Cynon Valley, Hilary Schan Chair, We Deserve Better and Independent councillor in Worthing, Anthony Slaughter Wales Green party leader