Jeremy Corbyn dismantles Rachel Reeves – saying she’s protecting the “corporate elite

Reading Time: 3 mins read

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has delivered a reality check to Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Jeremy Corbyn: Reeves “holding our country to ransom”

In the MP for Islington’s response to the spending review, he began:

Until this government stands up to the corporate elite holding our country to ransom, it will never bring about the change the British public deserves

Jeremy Corbyn went on to detail what standing up to the corporate elite would look like:

The government could, if it wanted to, tax the wealthiest in our society in order to end child poverty, fix the social care crisis, and fund a bold programme of public investment. It could end the rip-off of privatisation and finally bring water and energy and healthcare into public ownership. It could take on fossil fuel giants to kickstart a Green New Deal. Instead, today’s unambitious statement bakes in decades of inequality, depriving millions of people of the resources they need.

Rampant inequality is a key issue in the UK. And Reeves’ review does little to address it. According to Oxfam, 70% of the country own less wealth than the top 1% as of 2023. That is why so many are calling for a wealth tax, which would rebalance society by £22bn every year.

The privatisation of public utilities experiment has been a disaster. Whether it’s a lack of investment in critical infrastructure, asset stripping, across the board high rents on essentials, botched surgeries or eye watering fees for gas companies being ‘on standby’ (£12.5bn in ten years under the ‘capacity market’ scheme, plus price increases of 15000% under the ‘balancing mechanism’ scheme).

“Complete con”

Jeremy Corbyn continued:

As we speak, a quarter of a million people are homeless. For many of my constituents, the never-ending promise of “affordable housing” has been a complete con. The government must tell us: will its latest announcement result in proper social housing or subsidies for private developers? When will it get to the heart of the housing crisis and control rents?

Reeves remains silent on how many of the 1.5m new homes will actually be social housing. So far she has merely branded around 35,000 a year of them as ‘affordable’. Short of stopping treating housing like an asset altogether, rent controls could go very far in circumventing the housing crisis.

For more than 70 years, between WWI and the late 1980s, the UK had a system of rent control. It’s a policy that could drive down poverty and put more pounds in peoples’ pockets – as Labour has repeatedly pledged to do.

In many European countries there is some control over rents. In Sweden, tenant unions and landlords negotiate rents based on average earnings, inflation, and costs. In the UK, we do not have such a procedure and under 45s alone wasted £56.2bn in passive income for landlords in 2024.
More here....//

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2025-06-07 10:45:20

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Six Months of Slimming World Kitchen

Look away now if you’re hoping for positive news about weight loss. I first wrote about Slimming World Kitchen in January, so I thought it was worth revisiting six months on. My OH, for whom this meal plan was adopted, lost a bit of weight to begin with, but has very much plateaued. I think she’s still trending downwards, but only slowly. My own attitude to weight-loss diets is what everybody really knows: that they don’t work. I do try to eat a healthy variety of foods but I don’t weigh myself. I pay attention to which hole on the belt I’m tightening to, and I have remained on the tightest for the past few months, so. Steady as she goes.

We’ve all absorbed the advice over the years. Avoid too much processed food, eat plenty of fruit and veg, a Mediterranean diet if possible. I follow that kind of advice as closely as I can. I think I’m unusual in that I still cook meals from scratch, only rarely eating ready meals and almost never buying junk food. On the other hand, I do have a weakness for bread, biscuits, and chocolate. If I wasn’t doing this Slimming World thing, I might be eating chips every day.

Being on the SW Kitchen plan means at least five freshly prepared meals every week, and loads of fresh vegetables. Take today. It being Saturday, I cooked for lunch instead of the evening meal, so it’s easier for my OH to get through the day without feeling hungry. Today’s recipe was (above left) a risotto made with 140g arborio rice (between two people). To this basic starch was added four spring onions, a leek, a courgette, fresh garden peas, fresh spinach, parsley, mint, and lemon juice. Oh, and chickpeas. So that’s, um, either six or nine of your five a day, depending on whether you count the herbs and lemon juice. It was quite good eating, too. Most importantly, it was a lot of food. So much food that I couldn’t cope with it in this warm weather, so I put a cover over my plate and I’ll finish it later on.

Last night’s meal (above right) was a skinless salmon steak served with oven roasted potatoes, courgette, tomatoes, onion, fresh basil, capers, lemon wedges, and a sundried tomato and garlic paste coating. Again, very enjoyable and quite filling. It really is good food, and only occasionally do you feel like it’s missing something. For example, last week included a spag bol dish that was really good, very quick to make, but just begged to be served with cheese, like proper spag bol. So: I cheated and put some cheese on mine. My OH did not.

This week’s five meals cost £56 plus delivery, so around £5.60 per person per meal. I could feed us for less, sure, but it wouldn’t involve quite so many fresh ingredients. If I made a risotto, it would contain: rice, onion, frozen peas, and either chicken or mushrooms. So two or three of your five a day, at best. I wrote about trying to cook these meals with supermarket-bought ingredients in February, and concluded that, all things considered, the value for money was good.

We happened to get a £10 credit this week because last week’s delivery was somewhat damaged after being delivered in a rainstorm. I’ve found SW’s customer service to be spot-on and very responsive to the few problems we’ve had.

The variety of meals is excellent, so you don’t find yourself cooking the same things over and over. You do sometimes return to favourites, but that’s a choice rather than inertia. Next week’s delivery is laid out above. I tend to avoid the steak-based meals and I lean towards fish, tofu, and occasionally chicken. So the presence of steak next week is a rarity. The purely veggie meals tend to be the biggest platefuls, so if you like feeling stuffed, go for things like the squash and chickpea curry or the summer rainbow grain bowl. One difficulty I’ve found is you sometimes end up eating something that belongs in a different season: feels like winter food rather than summer. Again, this is a choice I’ve made without thinking too hard.

I’ll return, finally, to my only real criticism of this service, which I would characterise as faff. Today’s risotto involved a roasting dish, a saucepan, and a non-stick frying pan. If I were to make a risotto myself, I could probably manage in one pan. I’d pre-cook the chicken in the pan, set it to one side, then cook the onion, toast the rice, and start adding the stock. Finally, I’d chuck in the chicken and the frozen peas. For today’s meal, I roasted the courgette in the oven, cooked the leek, garlic, and spring onions in a pan, cooked the rice in another pan, made a puree with the peas, chickpeas, herbs, and lemon, and then combined it all at the end. The cooking process can be complex, the timings crucial, and for inexperienced cooks, or people who aren’t good at improvising, or just lack knowledge about how things work, I think they’re actually quite hard. Which is before you get to the excessive washing up! If I didn’t have a dishwasher, I wouldn’t fancy this at all.

Another example: it’s all very well telling people to “spritz a non-stick pan with low-fat cooking spray”, and then “fry the onion” but the estimated time for this is always way off. Practically dry-frying onion is not easy, and an experienced cook will know to add a splash of water to get some steam going—or that it’s worth starting this task early on and letting it take longer. Same goes for the steak meals I tend to avoid. If you don’t like your steaks to be really bloody, they’ll need longer. Or when they tell you to cook potatoes in the oven for 25 minutes: you think, and the rest! Because you know it will take a bit longer.

So complicated recipes aside, I do recommend this service. I think the complications come from attempts to maximise flavour without oil and butter, so I guess that’s the price you pay.

#Cooking #diet #Food #Health #SlimmingWorldKitchen

Six Months of Slimming World Kitchen

Look away now if you're hoping for positive news about weight loss. I first wrote about Slimming World Kitchen in January, so I thought it was worth revisiting six months on. My OH, for whom this meal plan was adopted, lost a bit of weight to begin with, but has very much plateaued. I think she's still trending downwards, but only slowly.

robmcminn.uk/2025/06/14/six-mo…

McMinn and Cheese

2025-06-14 13:09:44

Six Months of Slimming World Kitchen

Look away now if you’re hoping for positive news about weight loss. I first wrote about Slimming World Kitchen in January, so I thought it was worth revisiting six months on. My OH, for whom this meal plan was adopted, lost a bit of weight to begin with, but has very much plateaued. I think she’s still trending downwards, but only slowly. My own attitude to weight-loss diets is what everybody really knows: that they don’t work. I do try to eat a healthy variety of foods but I don’t weigh myself. I pay attention to which hole on the belt I’m tightening to, and I have remained on the tightest for the past few months, so. Steady as she goes.

We’ve all absorbed the advice over the years. Avoid too much processed food, eat plenty of fruit and veg, a Mediterranean diet if possible. I follow that kind of advice as closely as I can. I think I’m unusual in that I still cook meals from scratch, only rarely eating ready meals and almost never buying junk food. On the other hand, I do have a weakness for bread, biscuits, and chocolate. If I wasn’t doing this Slimming World thing, I might be eating chips every day.

Being on the SW Kitchen plan means at least five freshly prepared meals every week, and loads of fresh vegetables. Take today. It being Saturday, I cooked for lunch instead of the evening meal, so it’s easier for my OH to get through the day without feeling hungry. Today’s recipe was (above left) a risotto made with 140g arborio rice (between two people). To this basic starch was added four spring onions, a leek, a courgette, fresh garden peas, fresh spinach, parsley, mint, and lemon juice. Oh, and chickpeas. So that’s, um, either six or nine of your five a day, depending on whether you count the herbs and lemon juice. It was quite good eating, too. Most importantly, it was a lot of food. So much food that I couldn’t cope with it in this warm weather, so I put a cover over my plate and I’ll finish it later on.

Last night’s meal (above right) was a skinless salmon steak served with oven roasted potatoes, courgette, tomatoes, onion, fresh basil, capers, lemon wedges, and a sundried tomato and garlic paste coating. Again, very enjoyable and quite filling. It really is good food, and only occasionally do you feel like it’s missing something. For example, last week included a spag bol dish that was really good, very quick to make, but just begged to be served with cheese, like proper spag bol. So: I cheated and put some cheese on mine. My OH did not.

This week’s five meals cost £56 plus delivery, so around £5.60 per person per meal. I could feed us for less, sure, but it wouldn’t involve quite so many fresh ingredients. If I made a risotto, it would contain: rice, onion, frozen peas, and either chicken or mushrooms. So two or three of your five a day, at best. I wrote about trying to cook these meals with supermarket-bought ingredients in February, and concluded that, all things considered, the value for money was good.

We happened to get a £10 credit this week because last week’s delivery was somewhat damaged after being delivered in a rainstorm. I’ve found SW’s customer service to be spot-on and very responsive to the few problems we’ve had.

The variety of meals is excellent, so you don’t find yourself cooking the same things over and over. You do sometimes return to favourites, but that’s a choice rather than inertia. Next week’s delivery is laid out above. I tend to avoid the steak-based meals and I lean towards fish, tofu, and occasionally chicken. So the presence of steak next week is a rarity. The purely veggie meals tend to be the biggest platefuls, so if you like feeling stuffed, go for things like the squash and chickpea curry or the summer rainbow grain bowl. One difficulty I’ve found is you sometimes end up eating something that belongs in a different season: feels like winter food rather than summer. Again, this is a choice I’ve made without thinking too hard.

I’ll return, finally, to my only real criticism of this service, which I would characterise as faff. Today’s risotto involved a roasting dish, a saucepan, and a non-stick frying pan. If I were to make a risotto myself, I could probably manage in one pan. I’d pre-cook the chicken in the pan, set it to one side, then cook the onion, toast the rice, and start adding the stock. Finally, I’d chuck in the chicken and the frozen peas. For today’s meal, I roasted the courgette in the oven, cooked the leek, garlic, and spring onions in a pan, cooked the rice in another pan, made a puree with the peas, chickpeas, herbs, and lemon, and then combined it all at the end. The cooking process can be complex, the timings crucial, and for inexperienced cooks, or people who aren’t good at improvising, or just lack knowledge about how things work, I think they’re actually quite hard. Which is before you get to the excessive washing up! If I didn’t have a dishwasher, I wouldn’t fancy this at all.

Another example: it’s all very well telling people to “spritz a non-stick pan with low-fat cooking spray”, and then “fry the onion” but the estimated time for this is always way off. Practically dry-frying onion is not easy, and an experienced cook will know to add a splash of water to get some steam going—or that it’s worth starting this task early on and letting it take longer. Same goes for the steak meals I tend to avoid. If you don’t like your steaks to be really bloody, they’ll need longer. Or when they tell you to cook potatoes in the oven for 25 minutes: you think, and the rest! Because you know it will take a bit longer.

So complicated recipes aside, I do recommend this service. I think the complications come from attempts to maximise flavour without oil and butter, so I guess that’s the price you pay.

#Cooking #diet #Food #Health #SlimmingWorldKitchen