Best Of

The Discord / Zendesk hack from the other day just took a bad turn.

The hackers have 1.5TB of photos, 2.2m photos, related to age verification, and are using it for extorting Discord.

That’ll be 2.2m photos of passports, driving licences, national ID cards…

https://x.com/vxunderground/status/1975834621503062495

And, thanks to the OSA, they'll be disproportionately British...

Heads should roll at Ofcom. Their implementation of the OSA was almost guaranteed to lead to such issues. It's insane that we've basically switched from 20 years of telling people "don't give out Personally Identifiable Information on the internet" to "give out PII to anyone from anywhere who asks for it, to prove your age."

Seems a lot of people are very easily impressed by, essentially, "Let's have the smallest state possible and cut tax on everything" without any thought for how that bears out in the real world

Badenoch is being lionised here for giving a speech that anyone could give, setting out policies that anyone could advocate.

If it were that easy then the Tories would have already done it 10 years ago, reaped all the presumed economic benefits, and then won the next election handily. Except it isn't.

Stamp Duty has tons of flaws. There is some benefit reform that is clearly needed. Et Cetera. Hopefully Labour get rid of it - but with a property tax / land value tax of some sort to make up for the shortfall.

It is ridiculous to frame yourself as the party of sound money, and then say "We're undoing all of Labour's tax rises, we're not touching the triple lock, we're scrapping stamp duty... and um... we'll pay for all this with... I dunno, fewer civil servants?"

I too rather like Kemi Badenoch. Whereas Starmer is bad and loathsome, she is bad but amiable

However, she is pretty bad. The Tories maybe have one more roll of the dice and it’s gotta be Jenrick. He will at least get them noticed

Very able but too early? Is there a comparison with William Hague?

Yes. Like Hague she is talented, with lots of potential, but far too early to take the exposure of being LOTO after a crushing defeat. We'll see, but I doubt that Jenrick is the answer. The MPs really screwed it up by accidentally excluding Cleverly.

Talented?

She was Business Secretary at a time when the Post Office scandal was in the news and needed action. It still does, by the way. She did fuck all and when she gave evidence to the inquiry came across as arrogant and evasive.

She had a chance to show what she could do. She had a chance to show what the Tory party could be about - as on the side of the little people not the overweening corrupt and incompetent state. She fluffed that opportunity. I wrote about it here.

https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/07/18/a-missed-opportunity/

And every word of what I said then has turned out to be true. She has an ego but lacks emotional intelligence, achievement or the ability to work through problems and come up with practical solutions (see, for instance, her nonsense about the ECHR).

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.