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Evening all

While you've been talking about God knows what, I've been doing some politics and had a chat a party leader this afternoon.

No, not Kemi, Ed or even Zack but Mehmood.

Yes, that Mehmood, Mehmood Mirza, leader of the Newham Independents who had a stall in the High Street outside Poundland this afternoon. While Mrs Stodge dived for cover in the charity shop, I introduced myself to Mr Mirza, We had an interesting discussion on crime, housing and how badly Newham Council is run (in both his view and mine).

Mirza is adamant the Newham Independents will run a full slate of candidates as well as a Mayoral candidate next year and he thinks they can take control from Labour. He loathes Labour but has some time for the Greens - I told him I could see an easy route to 15 Councillors and possibly 23 but after that it would be much tougher.

His line was to blame the Government and the incumbent Council and unfortunately most of his solutions began with "if we had more money". That may actually convince quite a few in Newham but not me.

"At no point were the Cabinet told about the reality of the OBR forecasts."

https://x.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1995233439767798232


She's done. Be gone.

It told Reeves on October 31 that she had a £4.2billion surplus ...

No she f###ing does not!

The Budget deficit is in the hundreds of billions. There is no surplus! WTAF!? 😡😡😡

Ridiculous reporting. Our journalist and MP classes are genuine morons. It's little wonder the country is fucked.

"The current budget is the difference between total current spending (i.e. day-to-day spending excluding capital investment) and total current revenue. It is a similar measure to PSNB in that it includes all public sector current receipts plus current spending, however it excludes depreciation and capital spending." - OBR

Presumably that means it is a kind of real-time measure of tax/revenue income vs day-to-day spending in that current year/quarter?

It's not that either, they were talking about the fiscal headroom figure which is tangentially related to the deficit. It's the amount of money the government has available to overspend or undertax and still meet the fiscal rules of having debt falling over a 5 year cycle. The OBR told Reeves that she had £4.2bn in headroom available and then Reeves went on TV and implied that there was a big blackhole which would require tax rises, which was clearly not true.

Though you would surely have to be insane to run the fiscal headroom down to zero.

I don't disagree with you but it was an outright lie that the government had a new fiscal blackhole. That lie kicked off months of speculation on tax rises which damaged investment and jobs. She needs to resign for that.

And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.

That's debatable, AMD in its current from only dates to 2009. They started design work on the Zen architecture, which saved them, in 2012.

If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.

So, that shows how an established company can be successful, so it still goes against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.

Question is - what counts as an established company? Mine is 222 years old this year, but I bought it as a dried up husk on the verge of bankruptcy. We have some plant and machinery accrued in the previous 200 years (we still use a big hydraulic press built in 1900, bought second hand by the business in 1946), but are effectively running as a startup in the growth phase (we're at 6 employees from January, 4 years ago when I took over, it was me and two sub contractors).

I completely reinvented and fixed one of our main processes about 18 months in - the previous owners would never have taken that risk (it was pretty hairy at the time, basically burning all the cash I had, and some I probably didn't, on R&D, and relying on it coming good), but I realised that without fixing it we were finished. Having done that it's made us profitable enough to gradually grow and pick up staff and market share.

iain watson
@iainjwatson

And Your Party backs ⁦@zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.

https://x.com/iainjwatson/status/1995084398559900105

I see Your Party have agreed that neither Corbyn nor Sultana will be party leader but instead it will be led by a panel of members. So if Your Party won the next general election would we then be led by a panel of Prime Ministers?

More likely, we would have a nominal (one might also say Constitutional) Prime Minister, but they would be required to defer to the leadership panel for any actual decision-making.

Like Benn's model for early 80s Labour, only far worse.

They could get a people carrier to take them to the Palace

I would have thought something like this would be more ecologically responsible;


(Actually, The Goodies would be a pretty appropriately self-righteous name for a political party. Instead, the nitiwts seem to have gone with Your Party.)

"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty"
very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking

Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.

Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.

There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.

Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.

Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍

Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.

Couple of factors there, I reckon.

The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.

The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.

What I found so difficult to get into my head when I retired was the mindset that I am no longer a saver. I’m, effectively, asking myself for permission to spend what I’ve put aside. It’s an incredibly hard mindset to get out of and I should spend more.

I’m still saving, and annoyed with myself that I’m not saving as much as when I was working. When I first retired, I spent much more, doing all the things I didn’t have time for when I was working. Now I’m spending less, because of worrying what will happen to my SIPP if there is another 2008 crash, coupled with the knowledge that if I invest more cautiously, it won’t grow as fast over the longer term. The children have their own homes, and don’t really need an inheritance. I am trying desperately to convince myself to spend more, but it goes against the grain.

I’ve found giving it away solves that problem - it’s not really “spending” but you can find a local cause that you like and put something back into the community

My extended families need a fair amount of support which happily I'm in a position to supply. I may not spend much myself but everything I give away goes straight into the economy immediately. What makes me feel badly is the nest egg which I look on as there for maintaining the house and funding my latter years. It's small by many standards, but huge by others, and I wonder if it's really right to hang on to it.

It is - generosity is a good thing but not at the cost of destitution