Best Of

I do wonder about some people, the guy capturing the images on mobile phone despite the police screaming to get back stands there going ohhhh loook he has a bomb, ohhh he is trying to press a button, .....

Not going to lie, what really pisses me off about these people, they usually record the footage in portrait mode, not landscape, absolute roasters.

If somebody is a suspected suicide bomber the last thing I am thinking about is have I got enough space left to capture the footage in 8k on my new iPhone 17 Pro Max.....

It's bloody annoying when the footage is shown on TV most of the screen is filled with black bars due to them filming it in portrait mode, it looks shite when you've for an 83 inch TV.

Eagles, we share a bugbear.

Most of human existence takes place in a horizontal plane. We are a gravity-affected species and move flatly. Our eyes ae next to each other, rather than one on top of each other. Olympic diving and fireworks: portrait is fine. And portraits. But for anything else, landscape.
What really bugs me is people taking pictures of an actual landscape in portrait. The clue is in the name.

Two people have been murdered. Condolences to their family and friends, inadequate as those words are.

I don't care about the murderer. I hope he rots in Hell.

I fear he might have suspected he was headed somewhere else!

It's desperately inappropriate, but I can't get the rubber dinghy rapids line from Four Lions out of my head, reading this.

ETA: Four Lions got to the stupidity of this. I feel mainly for the victims, of course. But the perpetrator, what a stupidly futile thing to do. It does bugger all for any cause.

Same, the fact that Four Lions was set in Sheffield didn't help.

Funny thing is, I knew a real life Barry, from London.

He regularly used to chastise me for not being a good Muslim, the zeal of a convert is never good.

Edit Chris Morris explained Barry was based on a real life guy who was in the BNP who regularly used to attack Muslims, then he decided to learn the Quran so he could mock the Muslims he was assaulting but ended up converting himself.

I could see that happening to @Leon

What's worse is that I can imagine him posting these incredible passages from the Quran that only he had discovered.

Disgusting, wicked scenes in Heaton Park.
So depressing.

Now all Yom Kippur services at Manchester synagogues have been cancelled.

For two years we we've had hatred and threats aimed at Jews here - attacks on Jewish people in the street, people defacing memorials to the hostages (see Brighton), people drawing swastikas on the photos of the Bibas children hostages murdered, a rise in anti-semitism as set out in the recent Mordaunt report and plenty of other repellent incidents which shame, which ought to shame, our country - with damn all done about any of it.

And now we're going to get those who did damn all about it display their crocodile tears. It will be a revolting display. But not as revolting as this attack.

When I started a petition to express solidarity with Jews here after October 7th, I got sneered at by one poster here because it didn't have a lot of signatures on it a couple of days after starting it. Well this is what it said:

"There are 271,327 Jews in Britain (according to the 2021 Census). All have been horrified, hurt and saddened by the 7 October massacres in Israel and the taking of 224 hostages. Many will have affected friends and family.
Many of us, of different faiths or none, are equally horrified and saddened. We are particularly saddened by the increase in anti-Jewish prejudice and attacks here in Britain since then: verbal, online, the removal or defacement of posters showing the faces and names of the missing hostages, threats to Jewish schools, synagogues and other buildings, Jewish people feeling afraid to express their identity in public and so on.
We wish to express our solidarity and friendship with our fellow Britons, our sympathy with what you are feeling. We want to say to them: you are part of us, you are loved and valued and wanted, this is your home, you are safe here and will be protected. You are not alone."

I meant it then. I mean it now. I am glad to have gone on the anti-semitism march that autumn and only sorry that I did not go on the recent one for health reasons. I am ashamed at what we have allowed to develop in our country.

The Edmund Burke quote about why evil triumphs is well known. But this one should be better known: "Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

I only hope that those who have been harmed today will be be OK.

Always tax rises never cut current spending

The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.

The claim that: cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus seems far-fetched. Cutting the state pension in half might do it but that would be, in Sir Humphrey's parlance, courageous.

In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will save no money at all because pension payments would continue at the current rate. In the medium term, ending it will save money only in those years when the triple lock would mandate a higher pension rise than whatever replaces it, presumably a single or double lock, or tying the pension to inflation as it used to be, or to wages as it used to be.

In the immediate term, ending the triple lock will quite possibly save money within the next 12 months and should save vast sums of money within the next five years, since a single lock as it should be would not see yo-yo ratchetting as we have seen in the past decade.

It would save far, far, far more than any other policy could, because no other policy touches the sides of the expenditure this one does.

It sounds like you have mistaken the whole pension bill for the annual increase, and are then aggregating future years pensions but not the rest of government spending.

No mistake.

Increasing the pension bill by (for example) 0.2% less next year would save a very significant sum of money. More than almost any other feasible change.

Doing so, compound, over the next few years would save many billions of pounds, in the short term of our upcoming years let alone medium or long term.

So as I said, no immediate saving, and future savings only from the time the triple lock increase would be higher than whatever replaces the triple lock (assuming the state pension will not be frozen in perpetuity).

No, you're wrong.

Within the next 12 months is an immediate saving on a Budgetary level.

You're setting an insane bar if you mean "from tonight" as immediate, very few items in the Budget work that way.

No you're wrong. There is no guarantee of a saving because we don't know which of the three locks is going to be higher over the next 12 months. If we link to wages and they grow faster than 2.5% or inflation for the next 5 years then there is no saving in this parliament at all.

The triple lock has to go because of the long term fiscal implications but it makes next to no difference to the cash Reeves has available at the budget. You need to make an actual cut in something to free up some money.

I’m convinced that announcing an end to triple lock would lower long-cost borrowing costs (ie reduce long term gilt rates)

Always tax rises never cut current spending

The politicians do indeed cut current spending, and call it "austerity". The problem is the big ticket cuts are often things that promote growth or reduce costs. After they get cut, often, like HS2, at a higher cost than actually building the thing, everyone wonders why public administration is so crap and nothing works. The biggest thing that could be done now is to cut the triple lock on pensions. That alone would bring public finances into primary surplus. However "they/we contributed all their/our lives", even though, actually they/we mostly didn't. So in the end unless the voters are prepared to bite the bullet, you can hardly blame the politicians if they choose not to do so either.

I would introduce CGT on all property, including personal residences. I would base it on a valuation at 6 April 2026. Taxpayers would have a choice of paying gains annually or when they sell their property. I would ring fence the revenue and pass it to local authorities for a massive home building scheme. I would allow local authorities to bypass planning regulations for their own builds. This would reduce house prices to a more affordable level. It would increase availability of secure rented accommodation and reduce the emphasis on private rental, which is less secure, more expensive and poorer quality. It would rebalance income from national governments to more accountable local authorities.
It’s probably a good job I’m not looking to be elected!

Anything which discourages the housing market from clearing is bad. If you are a 65 year old whose kids have left home, and you have a house that's 3x as large as you need, then you aren't going to sell if it generates a large capital gains tax bill. What we want to do is to encourage the market to clear.

Personally, I would get rid of stamp duty and replace it with an annual charge based on the value of a property. That means that moving house is (almost) free, but staying in a house that is too big for you is expensive.

I would make the charge for homes that are occupied less than 180 days a year twice the regular rate, and for those occupied fewer than 90, I would make it four times the regular rate. This would discourage people from having homes they don't live in.

I do realise that these changes would be unpopular with a lot of people; but the very definition of economics is 'a study of the efficient allocation of scarce resources'. And I believe the tax and benefits system should be encouraging just that: efficient use of scarce resources.