Wait, did your caseworker just announce this eligibility to you without you having asked about it?

Or have I wildly misread the situation?

To the UK they are emigrants.

Expat is a casual term referring to someone whose employer sent them overseas on a posting. Diplomats are the most obvious example, but companies will use the same employment structure.

Different jurisdictions have different official terminology for this type of migrant worker, but their legal status in the host country is typically different to that of other categories of migrant worker in the same country, they are usually paid & taxed in their home country, and employed under the regulations of their home country (though in some instances, a host country may extend protections or impose obligations over them).

The confusion arises because when the UK had an Empire, huge numbers were sent abroad to run it, whether for companies like the East India Company, or as civil servants or on military postings, and so the British now think of “people who live abroad” as “expats” because that’s the word the older generations always heard, and then continued to use long after this ceased to be the predominant vehicle for of British to be living outside the UK.

The word is absolutely couched in a colonial past, but those using the term to describe other types of British people overseas are not generally doing so out of some sense of white supremacy or British exceptionalism, but plain old lack of awareness.

Late to reply, but very excited to have Moldova in our Union. I realise a yes vote is not a given, so all power for continuing the campaign to join if it does not succeed this time.

Yeah, the way people who’ve been on it describe how it changes they way it shifts their mental relationship with food reminds me a lot of the way those with ADHD describe the effects of their meds.

Going to come back to this to reflect in more detail to your original post and to this comment, but wanted to quickly float the idea that perhaps these people view you as particularly sound, so when they lay things on you or are just more emotional or intense in front of you, and you seem unphased - neither rushing to condemn them nor scrambling to reassure - they interpret that as disapproval from someone whom they find sound. And that because they value your judgement & integrity, they get sheepish and awkward in the absence of a strong outward reaction, which in turn you interpret as them thinking ill of you.

Only suggesting this because have seen quite a bit of this between people, and experienced mild versions of both ends of that dynamic.

Not that it helps, if it even resonates, or provides guidance.

Getting fees out of clients is like getting blood out of a stone.

Those barristers may not get paid by Tesco for years & not without a fight - they’re prohibited from taking retainers and from turning down cases, and though they can refer cases on to other barristers, the circumstances in which they can do this are very limited.

Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?

Seems unwise to give your child’s early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.

Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.

Correct.

You qualify through low income, and as the list to get council housing is long, need is taken into account also.

Right to Buy allows council tenants to buy their homes at a substantial discount on market value. This is alright, as it promotes stability and gives tenants equity, but at the same time, council tenants don’t get evicted anyhow, even if their income has become very high, and you can pass on a tenancy when you die if a relative was living in the council house with you.

But the money from the sale of council houses to tenants does not get ploughed back into buying or building more council housing, and the people who bought them can in turn sell them on the open market rather than back to the council.

This has made it near impossible for councils to maintain levels of housing stock, let alone increase it to reflect population growth. In central London, many types of essential worker are hard to obtain as too few can afford to live within commuting distance - large & high quality housing estates in the centre and all through the Boroughs having been sold off under the scheme long ago & snaffled up by developers.

Thatcher brought it in as a populist policy, and to weaken state services, but every other PM after permitted the policy to carry on unaltered.

Most of them seem closer to being wrong’uns than weird.

It is only working in the US context as it isn’t an insult per se, yet really gets under the skin of their conservatives due to their obsession with conformity, and enables everyone to mock their ludicrous ideas without expending energy explaining why each of them are so awful.

Entirely different groups of people, and they’re profoundly opposed to each other.

At the core of this massive protest/strike are groups which have been against the bombardment of Gaza from the outset, and protesting Israel’s war against Palestinians for years.

Yer a pterodactyl, Mox. A pterodactyl.

Tell people you vaguely know, too.

We dumbly agree, out of convenience or some notion that if we wanted to read the paper edition we’d have to pay for it, but one can shell out cash for the paper, pick it up in a waiting room, read a friend’s copy, etc.

As soon as we attach a subscription to an online edition, all that happens is they get more data on us (as we are les inclined to delete their tracking cookies) whilst handing over solid confirmation that we are who they suspected we probably are.

If you must subscribe, use a dedicated browser & multiple measures to confound tracking.

Right now, they can’t.

Money has gone, opportunity for very cheap borrowing (which is what a sane government would have grasped enthusiastically grasped in the wake of the last crash instead of breaking out to exploit everyone harder) is gone.

Maybe, if Reeves is given scope to do her shit, this country can not merely stall the accelerating decline, but turn stuff around.

Nothing is more vital right now & for some time than keeping faith against the odds that that can happen.

There is nothing to lose by trying to hold our nerve.

The portrait of Herzog which we all want to see, is the one he produces himself.

Reading the alt-text one might imagine a well-filled used condom of an especially fine latex.

Which isn’t inaccurate, but now imagine the above gazing at a girl the second Terminator right before it spears Conor’s foster mother right through her eyesocket.

Keeping a few of those little lens cleaning cloths in convenient places is about all I can think of. They launder fine too, if you notice any become less effective at removing smears.

If you ever need a new prescription, they should be able to put the new lenses in your current frame. Similarly, if your frame ever gets broken but your lenses are undamaged, they can pop them in a new frame. That said, keeping old glasses as spares is useful, and it can be fun to have new frames.

Nah, they’re nutters with very weird ideas about Britishness, Irishness & everything else, but they no more look to the English for ideas about their own identity & how to manifest it than the English look to NI loyalists as a guide.

If anything they tend to rather despise Englishness, seeing their own culture as the one true, loyal holdout to the Union.

The aprons do seek to emulate Masonic regalia, but the ideals of the Orange Order are entirely contrary to those of Freemasonry, which in any case is not specifically English or even British.

In the absence of irrelevant descriptors, many people struggle to remember that fascists can seem quite normal in other respects. Giving a few details helps them to imagine the woman. In turn this can quell fallacies that attach to ideas about “respectable” or “nice”.

That doesn’t matter with regard to this woman as her behaviour is now a matter for the courts, but reminds Times readers that the terror threat doesn’t come solely from disaffected louts hopped up on larger & sun exposure (& who may be quite partial to kicking off violently anyhow).

I’d think that in the absence of much to go on about her, they lifted stuff from her Twitter bio.

UK Labour’s position on Gaza is no different to that of the Tories (or to the DNC in the US). In Scotland, the SNP is strongly pro-Gaza, but were wiped out. That’s likely to have been in matters besides Palestine, but voters had the option to prioritise it and roundly rejected it. In NI & Wales, pro-Gazan candidates did less considerably less well than predicted 18 months ago. A few pro-Gazan candidates ran for the Workers’ Party - a handful of them won seats, but others, including their party head lost theirs. Meantime far-right Reform loathe Israel & loathe Palestine more, but made massive gains.

In France, pro-Gazan FI is a major component of NFP, the alliance which got the biggest vote share, but they only scraped that by working strategically with the rest of the left & with the neolibs to see off the far-right, and even this alliance did not win a majority. Within this there’s little to no agreement on Palestine, and FI’s position drew in some voters and alienated others.