Best Of

I'm at work and can't listen to the speech but the preview on Today this morning said she was going to say that there would be significant cuts in government expenditure and half of this would go to deficit reduction whilst the other half went on tax cuts.

Which is pathetic. How can anyone even pretending to be grown up and responsible about our finances even mention tax cuts when we are borrowing £150bn a year except as a long term, blue sky aspiration?

Our finances are under massive structural pressure. As the ultra cheap loans taken out after the GFC are rolled over at current gilt rates the cost of our existing borrowing is going to sharply increase. For as long as those lunatics occupy both the Kremlin and the White House the pressure to increase our defence spending is immense. No party of any stripe are brave enough to tell our pensioners that the Triple lock has gone far enough. Care costs are not even close to being adequately funded at the moment and they are heading in 1 direction: up. No government is going to be able to stop a steady rise in public spending, no government. The real issues are what steps are we willing to take to moderate these increases and how are we going to pay for them?

It is utterly dishonest not to acknowledge that increased taxes and fewer tax breaks are going to be in that mix. Once again, the real issue is what proportion of that upward pressure is covered by taxes and what by offsetting cuts elsewhere. Tax cuts? Jeez.

Stephen Bush @ the FT yesterday:

The UK in 2025 has a mounting tax burden that takes a growing share of GDP not because we have a particularly large state but because our healthcare system is essentially all state funded and we have an ageing population.

There is a viable centre-right solution to this, which is to introduce some form of mandatory health insurance, to fund social care through putting more of the cost and the risk on to individual households, and to scrap the triple lock pension and replace it with some kind of earnings link. The reason why this is politically difficult for the Tory party is that the party has so few working age voters that this would represent a declaration of war on the party’s own base.

There’s a viable centre-left solution to this, which is to increase basic rate tax and VAT, and have some kind of property tax to pay for social care. (There is also a non-viable centre-left solution, which we are living through now, which is to force businesses to take a bath and slow growth.)

This conference has shown that axing Kemi is unlikely to make the blindest bit of difference. The Tories are in a doom spiral of their own making, rabbiting Reform talking points to empty rooms and carrying on as if the scales will fall from everyone’s eyes any day now and they’ll be welcomed back with open arms.

It doesn’t work that way. People aren’t listening.

Kemi clearly doesn’t have the strategic vision they need, but then, who does? Jenrick just wants to ape Reform, how will that help if people still associate the Tories with a disastrous previous government? Do Cleverly, Stride, Hunt etc really have the political skills to both repudiate governments they were senior members of but also sell a vision for the future? And rising “stars” like Katie Lam haven’t been MPs for 5 minutes, do they really have the raw leadership skills to make a difference?

The party is in a sorry state and I’m not quite sure who can save it, other than Nigel Farage exiting the political scene and potentially freeing up some voters on the right, to shift back.

If they can survive the next GE then they might just manage to get a hearing with a fresh(er) face and a bold strategy. Whether they get that chance, very hard to say.

I am staring at the full moon over Monterey bay. Luminous across the waters, laying silver cobbles

I can hear the sea lions barking

What a place

Monterey Jack is one of the blandest cheeses known to man.

That may be so, but yesterday I went out sea kayaking and I was surrounded by otters, lying back on the kelp like pashas in furs, cracking crabs on their bellies

Magical

Now I am jealous!!!

I've only seen sea otters from a distance.

I met one on land while on a beach in an Alaskan fjord.

As a child growing up in Hackney I regularly came across water otters. It was only much later I learned that most people called them kettles.

Farage, the gift that keeps on giving.

EU steel tariff hike threatens 'biggest ever crisis' for UK industry
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy875px79po
The EU has announced plans to hike tariffs on imported steel in a move the UK's steel industry has said could be "perhaps the biggest crisis" it has ever faced.
The commission has set out plans to cut the amount of steel that can be imported into the bloc by half - beyond which the new 50% tariffs will apply.
The EU is the UK's most important export destination for steel, worth nearly £3bn and representing 78% of steel products made in the UK for overseas markets.
The commission has come under pressure from some member states and their steel industries, which have been struggling to compete with cheap imports from countries like China and Turkey.
The EU is proposing to reduce tariff-free quotas for imports to 18.3 million tonnes a year – a 47% reduction from 2024 levels...

The theory that tariffs affect the country imposing them rather than the country they are imposed upon seems to have gone missing on Remainer PB this evening.

Perhaps it was never quite that simple in the first place.

Tariffs damage both our country and the EU.

80% of our steel exports go there, or used to.

But Brexit put us in this bad place.

We do, however, buy more of their steel than they do ours.

Being out has tariff advantages too: not paying 25% tariffs on Chinese EVs like our EU cousins, for example.

I wonder what, if anything, we will tariff in response to these steel tariffs.

Yes, so a tariff war damages us from both sides.

Putting up trade barriers to our largest and closest market was supreme folly.

Indeed if we were still in the EU we may have been able to stop a tariff war with other producers too.

May be we could have a common trading area without all the politics stuff? Wouldn’t that be grand.

The problem is... you can't and you never could. Making economic decisions is political by definition. Heath knew that at the time and said so clearly. Those looking for apolitical economics are wishing for the Moon.

Of course these things are political. But that doesn’t mean you need a “ever closer union” monetary union, freedom of movement, etc etc

Well, 27 countries have agreed to precisely that. That's the deal, not some anaemic non Union which doesn't exist and which it appears no one else supports.

Which is why we left.

And why it’s so dull the jabs from people like @Foxy - they just state a true fact (a free trade area is better) without talking about the costs (the political baggage) and think it’s some kind of killer point.

Brexit has failed, indeed it is the primary reason that our nation is so divided and run down.

So we have the man most responsible for that debacle in pole position for PM in 2029.

We never learn.

Jenrick spouts damaging, self-serving, legally illiterate crap pretty much every time he opens his mouth. I could write a header listing all the things he gets wrong about pretty much everything but (a) I can't be arsed and (b) @viewcode would faint in horror at its length.

He is, in the words of my husband (mild-mannered, polite to a fault) an utter twat. (I have removed the adjectives as libel lawyers already earn too much.)

If he is the Tory party's best hope, we may as well order the sandwiches for the funeral tea now. The Tories have been irrelevant for some time now. They could try the hard work of resetting themselves. There is a route back for them but no adults willing to take them on that journey. So they are stuck. But if they go down the Jenrick route they will crumble to dust and deserve to do so.