Best Of

FPT:

The Tories seem intent on casting themselves into irrelevance by their attempt to out-Reform Reform.

They appear to have missed the fact that there is a gap in the market on economic restructuring/radical reform of the state literally crying out for someone to fill it, and instead are majoring on who can announce the most authoritarian policy/say the most dubious comment.

It is a desperate strategy I believe is doomed to fail. I am not even saying they shouldn’t tack to the right on certain topics, but that should not have been their emphasis. Anyone who wants a strong border policy and wants a culture war is already deserting them for Farage. They cannot offer anything different in that space.

There may be a gap in the market, but how big is it?
It's like the post earlier bemoaning the LD's not being Orange Book enough.
There's plenty on here up for it. But few in the general population.

And most of us who accept the patriotic need for economic restructuring shuffle away a bit nervously when its consequences look like getting too near us. If you want to know why Mel Stride is planning to not touch the triple lock, look at who votes for his party. Same goes for those who want to leave taxes unraised and those who want to leave public spending uncut.

The politics were hard enough in 2008-10, they are harder still now.

Indeed.
There's a good reason why the "economic restructuring" which is wildly popular on PB is exclusively a tax cuts for the well off, benefits and service cuts for the rest kind.

Why should all parties inhabit a space that requires high taxes and high spending in perpetuity? Why is there not a space for a party arguing for a smaller state, lower taxes, and working better with public expenditure?

This is not a message that is just the preserve of the “well off”, as you term it.

The State has shrunk, in many ways.

Let's break down government spending - education, healthcare, defence, pensions etc - and look at how much they were as a percentage of GDP in both 2007 and 2024:

                2007/8          2024/5          Change
Health          7.1%            9.2%            +2.1pp
Education       5.6%            4.1%            -1.5pp
Defence         2.4%            2.1%            -0.3pp
State pensions  3.5%            5.1%            +1.6pp
Interest        2.0%            3.1%            +1.1pp
Pulic order     2.1%            1.9%            -0.2pp

As a percentage of GDP, the amount we spend on justice (police, prisons and courts) has fallen by a tenth, defence has dropped more. While education spending has sharply contracted.

By contrast what we spend on oldies has risen shaply. Spending on health has risen by as much as we spend in total on defence! Spending on state pensions has increased by the equivalent of 40% of the education budget.

There is genuine austerity in government. We just don't see it, because we're spending ever more on oldies. (And bear in mind, this excludes all the local government spending on oldies.)

Police say they have dismantled an international gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China in the last year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20vlpwrzwdo

Meanwhile, British Transport Police have announced open season for criminals to steal bikes and cars parked at stations:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jm3wxvlkjo

The higher-ups at the police clearly want Farage as next PM.

They can seemingly always spare officers to knock on doors half a dozen at a time because someone was offended by a Facebook post, yet have no time to investigate acquisitive crimes against people and businesses. Bike theft and phone theft are horrible events for the victims.

I regularly review CCTV at work. It would take about five minutes to find when a bike was stolen on a 10-hour digital tape, if I knew at what time it had been parked and had a description of the owner and/or the bike.

Devil's Advocate on this: this news story entirely backs up the police's approach. If they had every constable chasing down every phone nicked in London, they'd never get anywhere given the scale of the issue, and the time spent on sexual assaults etc etc would have to fall.

Instead, some smart officer has noted that this particular phone is in a big warehouse, and that it's in a large parcel heading overseas. They've allocated resources including forensics (usually tied up in much nastier stuff) and with only a small team smashed a huge gang and disrupted 40% of phone thefts in London.

We know anecdotally that it's the same with bike theft - I've even narrowed it down to a particular industrial estate in Edinburgh. Let's hope the police take the same approach there.

Up to a point. It looks like the police have broken up a significant smuggling operation. What they have not done is arrest any of the people actually stealing the phones in the first place, and it is hard to be sure how those thieves will react to a loss of a large part of the market.

There is limited value in capturing the small fry.

I would like to see what behavioural science that's based on.

Zero tolerance policing does work, but needs resourcing. In isolation nicking the guy who steals a handset ties up a lot of resource and he will likely be straight back on the street. Even if you stick him in prison for a few months he will come back with enhanced technique and a broader criminal network

Zero tolerance requires more than just police resources, it requires expenditure on the entire criminal justice system from courts to effective non-custodial punishments, and we simply aren't willing to fund or otherwise resource the system.

I suspect that nicking this gang has created a new market opportunity for rivals, but that should be a spur to better intelligence led raids rather than defeatist.

I suspect the biggest single win in justice/policing right now would be massively reducing the gap between crime occurring and sentencing.

Police say they have dismantled an international gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China in the last year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20vlpwrzwdo

Meanwhile, British Transport Police have announced open season for criminals to steal bikes and cars parked at stations:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jm3wxvlkjo

The higher-ups at the police clearly want Farage as next PM.

They can seemingly always spare officers to knock on doors half a dozen at a time because someone was offended by a Facebook post, yet have no time to investigate acquisitive crimes against people and businesses. Bike theft and phone theft are horrible events for the victims.

I regularly review CCTV at work. It would take about five minutes to find when a bike was stolen on a 10-hour digital tape, if I knew at what time it had been parked and had a description of the owner and/or the bike.

Remember yesterday’s Crimean oil depot that was on fire? Well it’s still very much on fire. 🔥
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1975518739303985258

Meanwhile, it looks like the deal for Tomahawks from the US might be done. These can hit the Shahed drone factory and the Kerch Bridge, as well as a load more O&G sites currently out of range of existing weapons. 💣
https://x.com/kiraincongress/status/1975505313647223261

Clearly nobody thought outside the box when undertaking the risk-assessment for the SMO.

If somebody had told Putin a mass of the country's industrial base would being flattened, with his hydrocarbons sector ablaze north to south - somebody would have been out a window.

It has always been the obvious way to beat Russia back to its previous borders. Ukraine has had to wait though until the massive Soviet weapon stockpile was obliterated. The West has been quite canny in going to war with Russia without going to war with Russia. The same effect in three years of a low-level conflict rather than 72 hours of all-out war - with the real risk of it turning hot. But my God, have the Ukrainians paid a price.

Morning all

To be fair to the Conservatives (and I do try to be on occasion), the second Conference in opposition is always harder than the first and especially if the first was part of a leadership contest which itself generates excitement among delegates.

The reality of a potentially extended period of opposition has probably hit home and Sir John Curtice's comments won't have helped. The truth is the Conservatives still have a formidable councillor base with over 4,000 representatives across the country and while that may be reduced further next year, the 2027 round, in particular, offers some opportunities for recovery if they can be taken.

Curtice is also right to suggest the Conservatives stop "banging on" (Cameron's words, not mine or Sir John's) about immigration. Unfortunately, there are some nasty authoritarian ideas coming through this morning which would be anathema to Conservatives of another time and as we saw last evening, Badenoch's brash assertions about large scale deportations quickly unravel when the detail is probed (as would Farage's).

The economy offers some more fertile ground though Stride's initial nonsense shows the paucity of thinking on the Conservative side - quite apart from a gross misunderstanding of the impact of mental health (which to be fair the Coalition did a lot of good work on a lifetime ago), the numbers looked dubious in extremis and any credibility around radical economic thinking was shattered by the decision to retain the Triple Lock without explaining how it can and would be funded.

All hail the brilliance of Sir Ed Davey.

He is endlessly sneered at by mainly Tories as he quietly goes about building a machine to win seats and build a base...

I thought the Tory conference would be bad, I had no idea it would be this bad. You cannot outflank refuk to the right and yet that is still the Badenoch play. The Big Policy Announcements ripping up the work of their own governments - Coutinho slagging off the policies of SofS Coutinho being the funniest of the lot.

And then the Thatcher worship. A fucking museum this year. Of a woman who would not be welcome in today's Tory party as despite her economic policies the aim was to lift working people - a very strong safety net to catch the people at the bottom, significant investment into regions, Britain at the heart of international order, free trade. All now heresy in todays ReformCosplay and ScrewtheUnion party.

While the Conservatives are suffering (largely self-inflicted woe) the Lib Dems should not be feeling smug.

We have two main parties, both very very unpopular. Cui bono? Not the Lib Dems. They've been eclipsed by the latest Farage vehicle, content to be the approved party of Waitrose shoppers in leafy suburbs, uncontaminated by the need to appeal to the Great Unwashed, unsullied by the vulgarity of popular support.

Which is a shame, because, for all their wrongness about many things, I think the Lib Dems would be far better/less bad for the country than Prime Minister Nigel Farage, which is what we may end up with after the next election.

The LibDems don't appear to have a coherent concept of Government, rather than an assembly of miscellaneous ideas - they seem subconsciously to accept the idea that they're a supporting party rather than an alternative government, and I think their mediocre national poll rating reflects that, though the focus on winnable seats pays off. Reform do appear to see themselves as a possible government, albeit a bonkers one. I'd like to feel that Labour does too, not least as we're actually in Government (and I'm a CLP chair), but we seem locked into tactical planning, keeping the show on the road, not breaking explicit promises and occasionally making a gesture to one wing or another.

When was the last coherent credible plan for the country?

Regardless of whether I supported them or not I can only recall:

Cameron/Osborne/LDs
Brown
Blair/Brown
Thatcher

Probably missing some in opposition as those were all elected but don't think many. Perhaps being harsh on Major but it did drift into cone hotlines and random scandals.

What was Brown's plan?

I remember sitting in the car with the now Mrs-J on the way back from work when Brown took over from Blair, and saying something like "Thank God all that nonsense is over within the government. Brown can now get what he wants done."

This was in relation to all the infighting the Brown's minions were doing against Blair. The only problem is that it became obvious, very rapidly, that Brown had no plan. He had spent years scheming and fighting for the top job, and once he had it, he was like Wile E. Coyote when he finally caught Roadrunner. He had no plan, let alone a credible plan.

And then the GFC happened...

What was Brown's plan?

1) Abolish boom and bust.
2) Spend as if there's no tomorrow, since busts have been abolished and will never happen again.

And then the GFC happened.

We went from a budget surplus to a budget deficit in 2002/03, five years before the GFC due to Brown's overspending. When the inevitable crash happened, the result was inevitable.

Some here still try to excuse it as Brown not overspending, "if only the GFC hadn't happened", that is hubristic imbecility. Busts happen. To pretend you can abolish them is hubris.

Sane governments prepare for the next inevitable recession. By pretending he'd abolished them, Brown screwed us royally with his overspending.

Good morning everybody!

About to go for my Covid vaccination, which the website tells I can't have, at a site which the website tells me doesn't exist, but when I spoke to the staff there yesterday they assured me there would be no problem. I'm over 75, (by 12 years!) and there's never been an issue in the past.

On topic, I wonder if this will encourage Chris Mason and the rest of the BBC's political team to take their heads out of Farage's bottom and give some attention to the various LibDem spokespeople. I'd like to think so but will wait and see.

I'm booked in for flu and covid jabs tomorrow (history of leukeamia plus asthma gets me entitled). I am unsure about whether we need to keep vaccinating everyone for covid or not. Most who want it have had at least 4 or 5 shots. I don't know whether a boost its needed every year. We are NOT intending to vaccinate children such as my son, who is coming up to three in Jan, relying on natural infection.

And there are lots of people who are desperate to have covid shots because they have been terrorised over the last few years.

Not sure where the evidence on this is, right now.

I’m probably not going to bother with a Covid booster unless media reports say the current strain/strains is particularly brutal. It is like a mild flu then I will tolerate it. Biggest driver to make me have a Covid jab wagging would be if it was required to have it to go to places/travel etc.

Flu I will have as had flu for first time in my life last Christmas and it was brutal - worse than my worst Covid, also completely destroyed Christmas for me.

Only ever had flu twice - lost 36 hours to fever both times.

Annoys me when people upgrade a heavy cold to flu. There's no confusing the two.