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.