Latest Moan From You and Me 2025

I'd flip the whole thing on it's head - hold votes for prime minister and chancellor wholly separate from the rest.. even on a different day/month/year. Then, make each MP the head of their respective council area and have twin teams - so you elect an MP and head of the council on the same day as a duo. Any MP who wishes to transfer party or that loses the whip for any reason, immediately triggers a by-election. Any MP who is convicted of anything other than an FPN matter (so speeding ticket etc), also immediately forfeits their seat and a by-election called, with the incumbent being barred from holding public office for a minimum of 10 years.

 

Conspiracy, maybe, but you've got to admit that it looks hellish suspicious... especially targeting a US tanker carrying jet fuel for their armed forces.

 

Who knows... I suspect that there may be a degree of fear, not least as deckhands and crew on these vessels are the cheapest they can find usually (remember what happened with that ferry crew who were all made redundant overnight a few years back?) so a good number of them may have been too scared to say anything or act.

 

True. Wouldn't be the first though.

 

Not a surprise - fear of losing the job for a start would be sufficient. You'd be surprised the power that sort of fear has... there was a company, in my industry, local to us a number of years ago that had drivers doing double shifts and using two ticket machine modules with two employee numbers and a slightly different name to get round things and then going off to the likes of Poland on a recruitment drive (this was early 2000's, just as Poland joined the EU) to recruit drivers that would drive from 5am through to 9 or 10 at night. Same company rented houses and would put anything up to 6 drivers in the same bedroom.

The driver's did it as they got paid for every hour worked and were terrified they'd lose the job, as it allowed them to send amounts of money home that were huge to them. The consequences of the fatigue could have been (and I believe were, in at least one instance) fatal.

 

Why the word conspiracy? Bear in mind that just about any theory can be a conspiracy theory until it is proven true.

Do we know if it was headed for the US? Or was it heading to port to offload in the UK as we do have US airbases here?

I am no mariner, but I do know that they have to work with tides and I'd imagine that they also need to wait for slots in ports/terminals, so it may have been at anchor waiting for tides etc. Either way, it being at anchor isn't an excuse to hit it, surely?

I think we all need to be a bit more aware that we've been tinkering with geo-politics for a very long time now, especially posturing around Ukraine - Russia is certainly no friend, that is for sure and despite the allegations (conspiracy theories?) that Trump is in Putin's pocket, it is equally likely that he is no friend of Trump either... We're in the brown smelly stuff a lot deeper than a lot of folks would realise or care to admit.

Who knows - and as you say we almost certainly will never know the full truth.