UK British News Megathread - aka CWCissey's news thread

https://news.sky.com/story/row-over-new-greggs-vegan-sausage-rolls-heats-up-11597679 (https://archive.ph/5Ba6o)

A heated row has broken out over a move by Britain's largest bakery chain to launch a vegan sausage roll.

The pastry, which is filled with a meat substitute and encased in 96 pastry layers, is available in 950 Greggs stores across the country.

It was promised after 20,000 people signed a petition calling for the snack to be launched to accommodate plant-based diet eaters.


But the vegan sausage roll's launch has been greeted by a mixed reaction: Some consumers welcomed it, while others voiced their objections.

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spread happiness@p4leandp1nk
https://twitter.com/p4leandp1nk/status/1080767496569974785

#VEGANsausageroll thanks Greggs

7
10:07 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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Cook and food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe declared she was "frantically googling to see what time my nearest opens tomorrow morning because I will be outside".

While TV writer Brydie Lee-Kennedy called herself "very pro the Greggs vegan sausage roll because anything that wrenches veganism back from the 'clean eating' wellness folk is a good thing".

One Twitter user wrote that finding vegan sausage rolls missing from a store in Corby had "ruined my morning".

Another said: "My son is allergic to dairy products which means I can't really go to Greggs when he's with me. Now I can. Thank you vegans."

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pg often@pgofton
https://twitter.com/pgofton/status/1080772793774624768

The hype got me like #Greggs #Veganuary

42
10:28 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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TV presenter Piers Morgan led the charge of those outraged by the new roll.

"Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns," he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Morgan later complained at receiving "howling abuse from vegans", adding: "I get it, you're all hangry. I would be too if I only ate plants and gruel."

Another Twitter user said: "I really struggle to believe that 20,000 vegans are that desperate to eat in a Greggs."

"You don't paint a mustach (sic) on the Mona Lisa and you don't mess with the perfect sausage roll," one quipped.

Journalist Nooruddean Choudry suggested Greggs introduce a halal steak bake to "crank the fume levels right up to 11".

The bakery chain told concerned customers that "change is good" and that there would "always be a classic sausage roll".

It comes on the same day McDonald's launched its first vegetarian "Happy Meal", designed for children.

The new dish comes with a "veggie wrap", instead of the usual chicken or beef option.

It should be noted that Piers Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm, so I'm thinking this is some serious faux outrage and South Park KKK gambiting here.

 

[Elysian]

“It’s afraid. It’s afraid!”

 

[femboy fart huffer]

Yea the ones inciting violence online are the focus. Obviously. Half of Belfast is on fire but have we considered how this impacts ofcom's ability to prevent you saying nigger online?

 

[Tony Martin's Force Ghost]

Cities are a powder keg, especially in Scotland and Ireland. Things are actually being set on fire.

The priority - people saying nigger on Twitter and Facebook...

How very French Revolution of them, the danger is not at the door, but the people far away. It's been over 200 years, but they never learn.

 

[UselessRubberKeyboard]

Has anyone read "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek ? It was written 80 years ago but seems to be fantastically prophetic about the tactics of the current Socialist government.

Yes, but it’s been a few years. Very interesting book, need to drag my copy out again. Hayek is (was?) an excellent writer on the subject.

@Otterly I have a Frister-Rossmann quilter’s sewing machine (although I don’t make quilts). That thing has sewn whatever I’ve thrown at it for around a decade and only just a few months ago thrown a strop. Simple service fixed it right up. It works right out of the box every single time, unlike any other sewing machine I’ve ever had bar my mum’s old manual Singer. No idea if the company is still going as Germany seems to be collapsing economically even more than the U.K., but if you can get hold of a Frisky they’re good machines. That said, Juki and Janome are apparently great.

Whatever happened to Brother and Singer? Those machines used to be almost bomb proof, but now they’re supposedly as fucking useless as all the rest? Enormous shame.

 

[SirCliveSinclairdabbing]

Whatever happened to Brother and Singer? Those machines used to be almost bomb proof, but now they’re supposedly as fucking useless as all the rest? Enormous shame.

The bombproof design was open licensed worldwide. Up to 1980 at least are still solid. Key indicator is metal gearing inside. Metal body is better and a winner for thicker materials but has less options.

 

[Heinrich Maneuver]

Narrator: it was a distant third

Trying to claim that X group helped Y group during a war so they have a right to be there is like saying the Danes should be given citizenship in the Congo or Biafra

Mini marts to be closed for up to a year under new law (X)

Illegal mini-marts, barbers and vape shops could be shut for up to a year under new powers announced by the government, following lengthy investigative reporting by BBC News into organised crime on British high streets.

We have exposed drug gangs, child sexual exploitation, money laundering and immigration crime linked to shops selling illegal cigarettes, vapes and drugs.

As the law stands in England and Wales, authorities can only close a shop for three months, with an option to extend closure to six months using anti-social behaviour legislation. The government's planned change will double the potential closure time.

Making the announcement, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood praised the BBC's reporting, saying that people felt high streets were being taken over by "organised crime [and] immigration criminality". The government was "not prepared to tolerate it", she said.

This type of criminality "makes people lose faith, not just in their local area but in democracy, in what our country is, and we can't let that happen", she added.

The Home Office says the extended closures will give investigators more time to gather evidence, pursue prosecutions and identify business owners, while preventing rogue operators from simply reopening and resuming illegal activity.

The news has been welcomed by Trading Standards officers, who have repeatedly told us they lack the necessary powers to tackle the problem.

"Closure orders are a key enforcement tool... for tackling 'dodgy shops'" says John Herriman, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI).

There is "almost universal support" from his profession for the new measures, he adds.

Other Trading Standards officers told us it would become less financially viable for unscrupulous business owners to simply sit out closure orders, and it would force landlords to pay more attention to who they are renting to.
'Open criminality'

For nine months, we have repeatedly asked the home secretary for an interview to discuss what we had found.

Last week, we were invited to join Mahmood on police raids of mini-marts on Soho Road in the Handsworth area of Birmingham - a high street bordering her own constituency.

At one shop, police and Trading Standards officers found illegal cigarettes and snuff (finely ground tobacco). A shopworker was arrested after a makeshift weapon - a plank with a nail - was found under the counter.

The shopworker, who said he was a student from Afghanistan, admitted that he thought selling illegal cigarettes was wrong.

When asked why he was selling them, he replied: "Perhaps you should ask the manager, he's the owner." However, the owner was not about, he said.

Soho Road has recently been the focus of Operation Fearless, a West Midlands Police initiative to tackle street-level crime.

"In all the areas I've worked in… it's by far the worst here," one of the officers involved, PC Victoria Gaunt, told us.

She said police had found shops selling prescription drugs, cocaine, heroin and cannabis. "You name it, you can probably buy it," she told us, and added that she would not feel safe in the area if she was not wearing her uniform and stab vest.

She also said she had seen "people walking around with machetes, chasing people" and witnessed "a huge increase in prostitution and exploitation of girls".

A BBC undercover reporter also visited about a dozen businesses on Soho Road and found counterfeit packs of cigarettes on sale for as little as £3. The average cost of a genuine pack is between £16.50 and £19.50.

Shopworkers also told the reporter there was open drug dealing on the street.

The home secretary told us she understood public feeling and said she and her family were also frustrated at seeing "people who are getting away with breaking our laws, getting away with open criminality".
'Broken system'

Over the course of 14 months, BBC News has exposed the shocking reality of organised crime taking over high streets in England and Wales.

We joined the National Crime Agency (NCA) last year as it raided barbers, mini-marts and vape shops, after reports they were being used for money laundering and illegal working.

In the following months, we were shown shops with secret underground tunnels supplying sacks of illegal cigarettes, we exposed asylum seekers buying and selling shops for cash, and exposed a Kurdish organised-crime gang operating the length of Great Britain.

In March this year, we revealed how a senior council worker had repeatedly shared with local authorities reports of children as young as 11 being sexually abused in mini-marts.

Most recently, we went undercover to report how cocaine, cannabis, laughing gas and prescription pills were being offered on a West Midlands street described as "lawless" by an anonymous law enforcement source

The home secretary said late last year that the BBC's evidence, gathered up until then, proved "the system was broken" and announced an "urgent" investigation led by the NCA, Immigration Enforcement, HMRC and police forces from across England and Wales.

Last month, the government announced a new £30m High Street organised crime unit which it said would deliver new police and Trading Standards officers, tax raids and a crackdown on illegal working.

Asked if the government's intervention was too little, too late, Mahmood told the BBC she believed the latest measures represented a "game-changing national crackdown".

The Home Office says the new extended closure orders should become law by the end of this year, after it lays secondary legislation. The new powers will then come into force in early 2027.

The government says it will be briefing authorities in Northern Ireland and Scotland of the changes to closure orders in England and Wales, as they have different enforcement legislation in place for shutting shops.

Greens found to be underpaying staff (X) remember they want £15 minimum wage

A Unite the Union audit of the Green party has found 47% of workers for the party are struggling financially, and 46% believe they are being underpaid

They have warned the Greens are paying wages "considerably" below market rates

I don't want to give him any coverage on the riot thread but UKSploosh (or an associate?) the auditor appears to be at the Belfast riots, but behind police lines. The NI rioters have already warned auditors to not show up

 

[Eekum Bokum]

And then we sent all of our middle class off to lead suicidal charges into no man's land where they all died. And also introduced inheritance tax and so on that just so happened to fuck over the few remaining middle class people the most. And suddenly all class modality died and the upper class (read politicians) decided to fuck over the working class now that they had very little ability to fight back.

Germany shouldn't have invaded Belgium then.

 

[BongoMongo]

Yes, but it’s been a few years. Very interesting book, need to drag my copy out again. Hayek is (was?) an excellent writer on the subject.

@Otterly I have a Frister-Rossmann quilter’s sewing machine (although I don’t make quilts). That thing has sewn whatever I’ve thrown at it for around a decade and only just a few months ago thrown a strop. Simple service fixed it right up. It works right out of the box every single time, unlike any other sewing machine I’ve ever had bar my mum’s old manual Singer. No idea if the company is still going as Germany seems to be collapsing economically even more than the U.K., but if you can get hold of a Frisky they’re good machines. That said, Juki and Janome are apparently great.

Whatever happened to Brother and Singer? Those machines used to be almost bomb proof, but now they’re supposedly as fucking useless as all the rest? Enormous shame.

We had a hand turn one made in Glasgow with a wooden case. It was bloody heavy as my three cracked metatarsals will attest.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

How very French Revolution of them, the danger is not at the door, but the people far away. It's been over 200 years, but they never learn.

I was told recently that basically most politicians will just repeat the party line until you basically bombard their offices with letters, emails and phone calls.

They will then actually discuss it properly inside the party and then work out how to pivot.

When someone told me this, all I could think was, If this is true, how fucking disingenuous! This basically erodes trust between them and the people they are supposed to represent.

 

[Brumbletroons]

Is this word from your top secret government source? Go out and read the data yourself instead of shoveling goyslop articles down your throat.
The data for this is dog shit, make of it what you will:

Here's the government's official figures adjusted per 1,000, which shows, ultimately, that white people are under-represented vs. the population at large:
This also, as far as I'm concerned, is far of the mark of the arrest rates that South Asians should be hitting were the police force bothered in the slightest by the grooming gangs and all the scams they're running.

Haven't the UK police already admitted their arrest/crime-solving rates were woefully dismal? You're arguing about the racial breakdown of arrests made but given they couldn't mange to even identify a suspect in nearly half of all criminal cases back in 2019, how can we use the figures either of you linked as an indication of the true ethnic breakdown of criminality in the country? As far as any of us could be aware, these stats could be heavily impacted by the amounts of criminal offenses which either never see any action enforced against them, or are outright dropped because it would be "culturally insensitive to pursue the suspects".

Crime solving rates 'woefully low', Met Police Commissioner says (2019)

Home Office figures show that in England and Wales last year only 8.2% of crimes recorded by police resulted in a suspect being charged or summonsed to appear in court, the lowest level since 2015 when a new method of counting detections was introduced.
For some individual crimes, clear-up rates were even lower: 3.8% for sexual offences; 5.4% criminal damage and arson; 6% theft.
The Home Office statistics suggest there is a range of reasons why fewer prosecutions are being brought.
In 45.7% of offences, no suspect was identified. Over one-in-five of cases failed to proceed because the victim did not co-operate, and in almost one in 10, there were other problems with evidence.

Most of the rest of the article is the police commissioner bitching about how data processing is a major bottleneck in solving crimes, but they clearly haven't done much to address the issues since in more recent news they were raked over the coals for failing to solve 92% of burglaries across the country

Police failed to solve a staggering 92% of burglaries in Britain last year (2026)

Out of the 184,783 cases finalised in 2025, roughly 143,000 were shut without a suspect being identified – amounting to 393 cases a day.
A further 27,500 cases identified a suspect but failed to lead to a prosecution, while in 400 cases, police decided further action was "not in the public interest".
Around 45,000 investigations remain ongoing, many of which are expected to close without result.

There are ideological reasons for law enforcement not wanting to admit there are distinct ethnic groups in the country that are almost entirely unenforceable (See the police not daring to touch any of the predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs). I also don't trust the figures they provide as being an accurate snapshot of the state of policing in the country given they have a vested interest in not "stirring up racial division" and admitting overrepresentation by certain groups could lead to big baz having a naughty wrongthink and 13/50 posting on X.
I don't trust them to be transparent about the state of affairs and not just publish the most palatable, sanitized version of their stats.

 

[Polska krowa]

Haven't the UK police already admitted their arrest/crime-solving rates were woefully dismal?

Sure, but if the needle is moving in any direction it's more towards my argument that white Brits are less likely to commit crimes than minority groups. I was just using official statistics to demonstrate that the other guy was full of shit.

I wasn't commenting on the accuracy of the source... But if the data looks that bad for black people in general per the government, you know the reality is a lot worse.

 

[Heinrich Maneuver]

Belfast attack triggers major new illegal migration crackdown in Northern Ireland as arrests skyrocket (X). A lesson from the Ulstermen, rioting gets you what you want.

The government has announced a range of new illegal migration crackdowns in Northern Ireland after the attack in Belfast, as arrests continue following unrest yesterday.
A government source has confirmed the Government will intensify immigration enforcement to track down, detain, arrest and remove illegal migrants in Northern Ireland.
As well as the Home Secretary is investing £3.7billion into immigration enforcement activity over the next three years including in Northern Ireland.
Investment into enforcement will increase by over 20 per cent by 2028/2029.

The new investment will see a surge in intelligence-led operations lead by Immigration Enforcement and Border Force have taken place along routes to detect, track down, arrest and remove illegal migrants.
During the intensification, immigration officers will provide round the clock coverage of various seaports, airports, roads and rail networks to catch those circumventing UK immigration laws.
A government source said that since the general election, a multi-agency crackdown targeting abuse of the Common Travel Areas has led to the arrest of 250 organised criminals and immigration offenders, as well as the seizure of over £435,000 of criminal cash.
They also said that under this government, immigration enforcement raids to detain and remove illegal migrants in Northern Ireland have increased by 16 per cent.

The CPA is an agreement between Britain and Ireland that allows British and Irish citizens free movement and the "associated rights and privileges."
Irish citizens do not need permission to enter or remain in the UK.
No new money is being used as part of the plan.
The family of stabbing victim, Stephen Ogilvie, have said that the unrest seen in Belfast last night is "not welcome.

In a statement they said: "We are completely devastated by the horrific attack on our loved one on Kinnaird Avenue.
“This has been a massive shock to our whole family, and right now, our only priority is being at his bedside and helping him recover.
“We want to say a profound thank you to the local people who bravely stepped in during the attack.
“Your quick actions absolutely saved his life, and we will never forget what you did for him in that moment.
“We are aware of the tensions and talk of protests following this incident.
We want to make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome, and peaceful protest is the only way forward.
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work.
“We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility."
Three people have been arrested following the disorder overnight, with concerns of more disruption this evening.

 

[Vesperus]

Belfast attack triggers major new illegal migration crackdown in Northern Ireland as arrests skyrocket (X). A lesson from the Ulstermen, rioting gets you what you want.

I'm sufficiently jaded to ponder the gap between "government announces" and "government does".

 

[Midwit]

(not us, fuck off)

Only if you back us when we get to Hong Kong.

I dont drive a german car because I cant fucking afford one because my country is full of worthless human sewage

I, like all true Englishmen, drive a French car. Or at least I would if it didn't the waiting time for a driving tests isn't SIX FUCKING MONTHS.

 

[Betonhaus]

I'm sufficiently jaded to ponder the gap between "government announces" and "government does".

Probably somewhere between “oh crap they’re still rioting I guess we actually have to do something” and “oh they believed us and stopped rioting let’s forget about it”

 

[French Dip]

Only if you back us when we get to Hong Kong.

Well help you take Hong Kong, but only if the goal is to reinstall the old rulers of China so it can stand in its own.

 

[Betonhaus]

Frightening to think what it was intended to be.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

I haven't given a shit about Doctor Who since I was 12.

 

[BongoMongo]

Russell T Davies needs to die of AIDS. Absolutely insufferable piece of shit of a man.

 

[DSP for president 2032]

Azmongould iz officialih laffin at Stahmah gettin' bullied in public.



It's so ovah foh Stahmah.