Citation needed

Hello, you glorious beasts.

An NHS employee just won £29,000 after a colleague took a Star Wars personality test on her behalf and announced she was “Darth Vader”.

The tribunal ruled that comparing someone to the infamous Sith Lord constitutes workplace "detriment."

So if you're struggling to get a GP appointment, just coax a colleague into calling you Voldemort and go private.

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TECH
Why is Wikipedia suing the UK government?

Wikipedia is legally challenging the UK’s Online Safety Bill to protect its army of volunteer contributors from authoritarian regimes and weirdos. 

Why?

The Online Safety Bill requires the UK’s largest websites to verify their users. This is to prevent trolls from saying nasty things on the internet. 

Wikipedia says this will require them to collect data on their anonymous volunteers. 

Failure to do so would result in an £18 million fine or worse. 

Why don’t they want to verify their users? 

Wikipedia relies on the goodwill of millions of (mostly) anonymous contributors worldwide. 

By collecting their data (running the risk of getting hacked), Wikipedia could get those contributors:

• Arrested

• Stalked

• Sued. 

Wikipedia’s army of contributors (which includes that bored Chinese housewife who spent years writing “high-quality”, marvellously interwoven but totally imaginary accounts of Russian history on Wikipedia) must be protected. 

It’s all in the small print

Wikipedia isn’t challenging the bill itself, or even the requirement to verify users. 

It just doesn’t want to be lumped in with the likes of Meta and Google. 

Under the rules, Wikipedia is a ‘category 1’ site (a site with loads of users) just like big social media behemoths. This gives it a choice. Either:

• Verify user identities

• Or let anonymous users block or remove other users’ content. 

Which would be anarchy. 

What happens now? 

If the high court agrees with them, it can rule the Online Safety Act as unlawful. 

They did it in 2019, and even Boris bloody Johnson respected their decision.

It’s hard to see Sir Keir Starmer, knighted for “services to law and criminal justice”, failing to do so.

ENVIRONMENT
When car parks become energy generators

Energy secretary Ed Miliband (former Labour leader/bacon connoisseur) is considering plans to force offices, supermarkets and shopping centres to install solar panels above their car parks. 

What’s the plan?

These “carports” will provide EV charging stations powered exclusively by solar panels on the roof. 

Under the proposed scheme, all new car parks will be built with solar panels, and old ones kitted out. 

Miliband lamented, “Right now, the sun is shining on hundreds of thousands of car parking spaces across the country which could be used to power our homes and businesses.” 

Why should I care?

• The UK’s growing group of EV drivers will enjoy more available charging ports

• Supermarkets could save £28,000 a year on energy bills (and make a quick buck by selling surplus energy back to the grid)

• The Government could get one step closer to its 2030 carbon-zero target. 

Praise be! Everyone’s a winner. 

Will it work? 

It’s already been done, mate.

• Bentley did it at its car plant in Crewe, and now all its manufacturing is powered by its carport solar energy

• The French mandate that every 80-space car park must have a solar-powered charging port. Combined, they generate an additional 11 GW of solar capacity (enough to power 11 million homes). 

JOBS
We need teenagers to drive our trains

Train companies are finding it hard to recruit and train enough train drivers, despite offering £70k a year wages for what is, in effect, just pushing a load of buttons. 

Why the shortage? 

7 out of 8 train cancellations are due to a shortage of drivers, possibly caused by:

• Thousands of drivers are reaching retirement 

• 3 am starts (hence why only 3% are under the age of 30)

• Requirement for drivers to live near depots

• High fail rate for psychometric test (65%)

• 90% pass rate required for the ‘rulebook’ exam 

What are the government doing? 

They’ve lowered the minimum age of drivers from 20 to 18. 

This will help, says the transport secretary. It’ll allow young people “to go straight into training” instead of:

• Twiddling their thumbs

• Playing Fortnite

• Watching “nature documentaries” in a basement

• Getting radicalised by Andrew Tate (also in a basement)

or doing whatever it is that young people do these days.

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🏠️ 🌳 Sadiq Khan wants to build new housing developments on protected areas outside of London. Think Epping Forest and the Chiltern Hills. Khan reassures Londoners that “It's not all green and pleasant, it's not all rich with wildlife.” 

• 🛏️ 📨 Reform is suing the Home Office to close down asylum hotels in the areas it now controls. Reform claims it has some of the best lawyers in the country working for it free of charge. But the PM is a top barrister, so good luck to them.

• 🎁 🗣️ House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has accepted almost 300 gifts in the last 4 years, including skincare sets sent by South Korean diplomats, 26 ties and cufflinks, bottles of wine, hampers from Bahrain, and three Christmas puddings sent three years in a row from Privi Patel. Merry Christmas, Deck the Hoyles!

• 🔋 👷‍♂️ A new EV car battery plant will be built in the UK, courtesy of Japanese-Chinese firm AESC. This will be the second gigafactory in the UK, and AESC owns both of them. The government paid them £680 million just to do this, and it may well create 1,000 jobs in Sunderland, and will serve Nissan’s car plant down the road. 

• 🪖 💸 The British government will have to pay the EU to let UK arms manufacturers benefit from EU defence procurement programs. This comes after EU officials said the UK must "pay to play" if we want to benefit from the £800 billion in defence spending recently unleashed by the EU. 

• ☀️ ⚡️ The government approved the building of a 1,277-hectare solar farm in Yorkshire, capable of producing 400 megawatts of electricity, powering 100,000 homes. A spokesperson for East Riding Against Solar Expansion (ERASE) said it’ll lead to “another 20,000 acres disappearing under glass” from “a million Chinese-manufactured solar panels.” More power to him, I say.