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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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I'm not sure whether this counts as culture-war material, but it definitely is political, and I found it extremely interesting.

Daily Telegraph (found via Breitbart):

Revealed: Chagos deal to cost 10 times what Starmer claimed

Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal will cost 10 times more than he claimed, official figures reveal.

The Government’s own estimate of the cost of giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is almost £35bn, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act – far higher than the £3.4bn figure Sir Keir has previously used in public.

Labour ministers now face claims that they misled Parliament and the press with an “accountancy trick” to hide the size of the bill from taxpayers.

An official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at 10 times Sir Keir’s figure, at £34.7bn, in nominal terms.

The UK will pay £165m a year to rent Diego Garcia for the first three years.

The rent payments will then be set at £120m a year, increasing in line with inflation from year 14.

The document shows that civil servants were first instructed to lower the cost of the deal on paper to £10bn, to account for an estimated annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over 99 years.

Then it was reduced again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year using the Treasury’s Social Time Preference Rate, a principle that money spent immediately has more value than funds earmarked for future spending.

The final figure was calculated to be 90 per cent lower than the cash value of the payments the UK will make to Mauritius over the next century, in what critics say was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.

Writing for The Telegraph, Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “Instead of owning up to the costs, Labour have used an accountancy trick to claim the amount was only a mere £3.4bn.”

Foreign Office sources insisted ministers had used a “standard” calculation for long-term government spending, and denied accusations that it was part of a “cover-up”.

However, other projects announced by Labour have not used the same method, which has allowed ministers to advertise higher spending on popular policies. Angela Rayner has since launched a 10-year affordable homes plan that included inflation-level increases in government spending as part of the cost of the policy – a method not used with the Chagos deal.

I'm getting flashbacks to my Engineering Accounting class in college. Calculations in this vein definitely are used on a regular basis for cost–benefit calculations in engineering. And a long-term discount rate of 5–6 percent certainly sounds reasonable to me. But, if discount rates are being used selectively rather than uniformly, that indeed would count as an "accountancy trick".

As I've bemoaned on multiple occasions, nobody is making the UK do this. The ICJ doesn't count, I've seen arthritic dogs ready to be ol' Yeller'd with a better bite:bark ratio. You can - if you are a sovereign state larger than Sealand - just ignore them. Mauritius? Why are they going to do, cancel Jet2 holidays and paddle over in their canoe?

Has anyone considered pitting one sacred cow against the other? Someone needs to tell Starmer that he could fund the NHS and pensions for another 3 weeks with the money.

I genuinely don’t understand what’s going on in Starmer’s head.

Now, I’ve seen in a lot of lawyers this idea that respect for the Rule of Law is the one thing standing between us and full banana-republic-dom. you’re allowed to twist it into a pretzel but the moment you say, “the judge has made his decree, let him enforce it” you might as well be living in Trump’s America or Putin’s Russia. (And no, they don’t see a difference between the two).

I wonder if Starmer just sees himself as the last line of defense against the barbarians. If so it’s weird he gave the vote to 16 year olds.

At the end of the day 'The Law' is just a big pantomime that people believe in, like fiat currency. The theatre is enhanced with strange robes, wigs and funny words.

At the Nation State level, it is something to be used or discarded depending on how expedient it is. As part of the UN Security Council with veto powers, they can pretty much tell anyone to go pound sand over territoriality issues (assuming sanctions aren't in the wind).

This whole thing is a problem of their own making and seems to be a 'decolonisation' vanity project funded by the taxpayers.

At the end of the day 'The Law' is just a big pantomime that people believe in, like fiat currency.

But it's an important pantomime that they're willing to go to huge lengths to protect. A couple of Terry Pratchett quotes on justice and finance:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

and

“But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.”

Our current rulers are aware that everything is built on a foundation of dreams. It's just that they think this is necessary to uphold modern civilisation. That's why they're so invested in making sure everyone keeps up the pretence - they really do think it's best for everyone. Which is not necessarily to say they're right about that.

Of course, being aware of being in a dream is itself lucid dreaming. Which is fine, but when you start then trying to use that awareness to deliberately twist the dream in your preferred direction, it reaches the metaphor's awkward transition of dreaming being an individual person's thing to, well, something other people have a stake in.

Socially controversial social engineering that tries to leverage lucid-dreaming-like 'I know this is a dream, but others must still behave like a dream while I change their dream around them*' has some of the same experiences/connotations/implications of being stuck in a dream you don't control, but when then keeps changing for the worse. I.E., a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped.

I agree completely, especially with

a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped

This was a big part of Yes, Minister's critique - the Civil Service and 'British Democracy' might be all that stands between us and barbarism, but isn't it convenient that this lines up so neatly with what they wanted to do anyway?

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