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If you "wear a Trump costume on Halloween" that does NOT suggest you are a fan of Trump. It's Halloween,. You dress up as a monster

DERR

Actually that's a British view of Halloween. When I was growing up I was friends with two American boys whose parents were in the military. It used to baffle everyone else that they would dress up as Garfield or Spiderman for Halloween rather than vampires or whatever. They also sent a Valentine's card to everyone in the class including the boys which caused much hilarity.

I resile. You are right and I am wrong, and I am seeing it through the lens of a north London dad. Just did a bit of research, and yes some people simply dress as their heroes (or anything else)


So it is possible he was wearing the Trump costume unironically. But then why kill Kirk, who is a Trumpite?

There was some suggestion on X that Kirk’s killer might be someone embedded in the far right, for whom Kirk has apparently become something of a controversial figure ever since he did a 180 on the Epstein files & suggested that everyone should get over the Trump/Epstein thing and forget about it:

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1966327203601522826

If you were neck deep in the MAGA Epstein conspiracy end of the right, then this might seem like something of a betrayal & as we know there’s nothing worse than an apostate.

I have no idea what the killer̛’s motives actually were, just that it’s not completely implausible that Kirk’s attacker be even more far-right than he was instead of being a leftist. Extremist political infighting is not limited to weird Maoist splinter groups!

We're kind of missing the point here. It doesn't matter that much what his motives were. If he was a hardcore MAGAt, that doesn't mean most hardcore MAGAts are dangerous criminals. If he was a transgendered individual, that doesn't mean most transgendered individuals are dangerous criminals. If he was an antifa supporters, that doesn't mean most antifa supporters are dangerous criminals. Any ideology can attract dangerous, violent individuals, any demographic group can include dangerous, violent individuals, but we shouldn't judge groups by the actions of individuals.

If the US wants to stop people being shot, they need to stop fetishising guns.

So you are saying there is a large upside potential?

It’s becoming ever clearer that Britain’s primary economic problem is penny-pinching households and businesses. Labour have managed to suppress confidence even further since their election. Reeves’ number one priority at the budget should be to boost confidence.

I don't say you're wrong, but so many households known to me can't stretch their income to cover the full week. Spending every penny isn't penny pinching, it's feeling the pinch badly.

That’s always been true of many (even most) households. But it is emphatically not true of many many households. And it is absolutely emphatically true of many businesses that have got into the habit of sweating assets rather than investing in growth.

Our national savings rate is at historically high levels, and private (both household and corporate) debt is the lowest it’s been since the noughties. No wonder government debt is so high.

private (both household and corporate) debt is the lowest it’s been since the noughties

You say that as if you think its a bad thing.

It was excessive private debt that nearly destroyed the economy in 2007-2010.

Many of those individuals and businesses you lament for not having enough debt only survived 2007-2010 by not having too much debt.

Just to address this point from earlier in the thread.

The 2008 financial crisis has a lot to answer for. It did indeed burst what had become a debt bubble - though that debt bubble was very specifically related to excessive lending to American house buyers with no means to repay, and then repackaged into derivatives that banks poured into without any meaningful due diligence. That all led to systemic failure in the banking system, and money supply dried up.

The lesson most countries took from this, and the subsequent Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, was that everyone had borrowed too much and we needed to retrench. Governments, corporations, and households. I say most countries, because the USA took the opposite lesson - informed probably by its own experience in the 30s - and took a Keynesian approach to recovery. The USA recovered better than almost all major economies.

We then had QE for years. This suppressed interest rates, and in theory should have made saving less appealing and encouraged spending. What it encouraged instead was a series of asset bubbles fuelled by cheap finance, and the explosion of PE. But the assets seeing the bubbles were too often unproductive ones like real estate, or made unproductive in the case of equity by cost take-out from the buyers looking to flip at a profit.

Meanwhile households continued to feel the fear and put more and more money away for a rainy day, typically in low yielding unproductive assets. Just like Japan from 1990 onwards. And governments regulated banking capital to such an extent that it risk taking almost disappeared from mortgage or business lending.

And the low interest rates combined with risk averse lending meant that inefficient companies could survive as zombies, while more enterprising growth companies struggled to expand. Except, again, in the ISA where VC money continued to flow and the corporate world continued to invest.

Then we saw 2 crises in a row, all of which sapped confidence and reinforced the rainy day message: Covid, and the invasion of Ukraine.

The pendulum swings, and always overcorrects. We have been in a state of overcorrection since 2008. I know it’s totally counterintuitive to a generation brought up on the received wisdom that British consumers are spendthrift and over-indebted, and businesses need to protect margins rather than taking risks, but it’s what the comparative data say. If businesses don’t invest and consumers don’t spend (or at least save into productive growth assets) then the economy won’t grow.

The UK was sodden with sub-prime lending before 2007.

I know there have been desperate attempts ever since to blame it on the USA but the reality was that the UK was dangerously over borrowing and over spending in the 2000s.

And its not received wisdom that British consumers are spendthrift, its actual fact - if they weren't the UK wouldn't have a continual trade deficit.

Finally if the government wants to increase individual investment then getting rid of cash ISAs and not increasing taxes on pensions wold be the way to do it.

The vast majority of UK private debt is not consumption, it is housing. Without major structural changes to the housing market then commercial investment will be crowded out by housing. Its a can of worms, but the reality of British failures in investment, productivity and output have their roots in the UK housing market. That is the unmentionable.

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America.

Because America is our largest trading partner, military and intelligence ally and foreign investor and the world's economic, military and cultural superpower and what happens there often happens here eventually, from political correctness and the current reaction against it to supermarkets to fast food to the Internet to saying "passing" instead of "dying" for some reason. Not always - thank God Prohibition and loose gun laws have never stood a chance here and attempts to hook us on American sports have mostly failed, but overwhelmingly it's our largest foreign source of inspiration.

No other country comes close to the influence it has on us.

It makes perfect sense for anyone who cares about these things to follow American affairs closely.

But to an extent, that's a circular argument. America is a massive cultural influence on us because we watch it so closely. The downside is that many aspects of the British Question can't be answered by taking inspiration from our former colonies across the Atlantic. (Take the right's fracking obsession; just because it works there doesn't mean it works here.)

I maintain that the sort-of shared language is giving us a very false steer on how similar we are.

Seen some ferocious discussion Online about dating at work.
US opinion "Don't ever do it. One of you will be fired. It's impossible to keep secret."
UK WTAF you say?

I met my wife at our work and have been together for 63 years

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America.

Because America is our largest trading partner, military and intelligence ally and foreign investor and the world's economic, military and cultural superpower and what happens there often happens here eventually, from political correctness and the current reaction against it to supermarkets to fast food to the Internet to saying "passing" instead of "dying" for some reason. Not always - thank God Prohibition and loose gun laws have never stood a chance here and attempts to hook us on American sports have mostly failed, but overwhelmingly it's our largest foreign source of inspiration.

No other country comes close to the influence it has on us.

It makes perfect sense for anyone who cares about these things to follow American affairs closely.

But to an extent, that's a circular argument. America is a massive cultural influence on us because we watch it so closely. The downside is that many aspects of the British Question can't be answered by taking inspiration from our former colonies across the Atlantic. (Take the right's fracking obsession; just because it works there doesn't mean it works here.)

I maintain that the sort-of shared language is giving us a very false steer on how similar we are.

The left are also sometimes guilty of casually assuming Britain and America are basically culturally the same. The language of the BLM protests in 2020 seemed to infer armed British police casually shooting black suspects was commonplace. And I have seen it puzzlingly implied that slave ownership was common in Victorian Britain. And the changes to the abortion limit were a needless attempt to import a culture war we have managed quite well without.

So you are saying there is a large upside potential?

Yes, plus it is good for Labour that they aren't peaking too soon before the election.

GDP growth has actually been faster than most of the G7 this year. It just really hasn’t felt like it.

Well I shall be doing my bit for economic growth this week, as I have ordered four new Apple watches and five new iPhones.

That’s deserving of an MBE. We should start handing out gongs for ordinary people making extraordinary purchases.

He could toast it with English Sparkling Wine.

Didn’t you get the memo?

ENGLISH FIZZ

Hard to think of the term SCOTTISH FIZZ taking off in any context...

Made in Scotland, from girders.

Iron Cru

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America.

Because America is our largest trading partner, military and intelligence ally and foreign investor and the world's economic, military and cultural superpower and what happens there often happens here eventually, from political correctness and the current reaction against it to supermarkets to fast food to the Internet to saying "passing" instead of "dying" for some reason. Not always - thank God Prohibition and loose gun laws have never stood a chance here and attempts to hook us on American sports have mostly failed, but overwhelmingly it's our largest foreign source of inspiration.

No other country comes close to the influence it has on us.

It makes perfect sense for anyone who cares about these things to follow American affairs closely.

But to an extent, that's a circular argument. America is a massive cultural influence on us because we watch it so closely. The downside is that many aspects of the British Question can't be answered by taking inspiration from our former colonies across the Atlantic. (Take the right's fracking obsession; just because it works there doesn't mean it works here.)

I maintain that the sort-of shared language is giving us a very false steer on how similar we are.

The fundamentals of the UK are radically different from the USA, and our geostrategic interests, while they have intersected, are not identical.

When Acheson said in the 1950s "Great Britain has lost an Empire and still not found a role", this was not merely an observation, but an act of policy. The USA, from the end of the Second World War has acted to reduce British autonomy- most obviously at Suez, but also in such things as our "independent" nuclear deterrent. Macmillan believed that Britain should be "Greece to America's Rome", and most of the British establishment went along with it. From a British point of view NATO was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. However, from an American view, NATO also kept the Brits in line too.

Since the end of the Cold war, the US has been pivoting away from Europe, and with the advent of Trump this trend is getting faster and messier. Authoritarians like Farage are drinking the American Kool-aid, but the economic policies of Trump will lead to a permanent weakening of American power. Maintaining the American alliance is now an extremely open question. Were it not for the threat of Russia, that discussion would now be far more advanced than it is. Nevertheless, Trump's failure to counter Russian aggression requires us to do it ourselves and better to do that without an at best ambivalent, at worst treacherous, ally.

Britain now truly needs to find a role, and being an off-shore sub-colony of the unreliable, transactional American Empire is not a sustainable position. There needs to be a much greater sense of national awareness- but equally we need to rediscover our global partnerships. CANZUK is one circle, the wider European political community another. As for the US- while we have seen sinister McCarthyism before, the neo-fascism of Trump is fraying old ties faster that they can be repaired. Farage helped push us out from the EU, I very much doubt that he can push us into the US, indeed, the need for much closer ties with the EU is obvious to all and is slowly beginning to happpen.

In the last six months, the US-UK trade has fallen, routine intelligence sharing suspended, after the CIA leaks and the soft influence of the US in the UK has crash dived. Worse is to come, so we better get prepared. Even post Trump, the trust has gone, so nothing will be as it was.