Best Of

James O'Brien critical of Kemi and Starmer for not calling to censure Katie Lam. Lib Dems have broken rank.

Why should she be censured?

Disagree with her, convince people she is wrong. But she’s not broken any rules or done more than state her opinion

What did she say?

Tory MP sparks backlash after calling for legal migrants to 'go home' to make Britain ‘culturally coherent’

Katie Lam said many migrants who came to Britain legally will 'need to go home'

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/katie-lam-backlash-migrants-culturally-coherent-5HjdFgC_2/

Yikes!

It’s the language of the BNP.

FPT:

So the government is borrowing £20bn in a month, and £100bn in the first six months, that latter figure 13% higher year-on-year.

Err, I think it’s fair to say the public finances are totally Donald Ducked at this point.

Rachel needs to find £50bn of tax rises and £50bn of spending cuts this year, as an absolute minimum, and that’s still only half way to fixing the problem. At this stage in the economic cycle govt should be close to running a surplus.

Should it? Running a surplus is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Yes! Yes we should.

Half the problem the country faces is that it’s never recovered from Brown turning on the taps after the 2001 election, which made the 2008-9 recession much worse than it should have been, and it was just about back to level when the pandemic hit, and now appears to be getting worse rather than better.

Even if you are right that Brown overspent, it had sod all to do with the GFC; it neither caused nor aggravated it. And of course, Gordon Brown was the last Chancellor actually to run a surplus.

The issue is that we had a massive *structural* deficit post Brown. Simplifying massively he believes the tax levels from financial services would continue at that level for ever and so spent to the max rather than being prudent.

When they were proven to be a mirage we had something like a 10% of GDP structural deficit (ie excluding the impact of normal fiscal cycles). That’s just not sustainable

Indeed. There was even. Concern that the time taken to form the Coalition government would cause a borrowing crisis.

If Brown had been running a 4% surplus (say) then the GFC would have wiped that out, maybe put us into mild deficit. And we would have had less debt. There would have been scope for some borrowing to be counter cyclic - rather than cuts.

Note that the Labour plan was more cuts than Osborne.

How do you run a 4% surplus when half the country always demands lower taxes, half the country always demands more from the state, and 100% of the country demands both?

(Yes, I know those numbers don't add up. That's the point.)

By being disciplined and a leader

Edit: in practice you create a line in the budget “sinking fund for debt repayment” and claim a balanced budget while simultaneously retiring 4% of GDP worth of debt

There are a whole set of things that you should be doing before repairing debt - building infrastructure such as roads or HS2 to grow the economy would be a better use of some of the money.

"A plurality of voters" can go fuck themselves. Taxing an industry into oblivion is illogical. We are a bad country.

Now, now, we are always being told majorities are right about everything and policy should be dictated by what the people want via focus groups, elections, surveys etc.

There's a perception out there bookmakers and similar have grown fat on the proceeds from the poor punters (winners at 100/1 and 200/1 and Ascot on Saturday give that some marginal credence).

I've always been of the view the Lottery is a stealth tax on the poor - the chances of anyone winning that life-changing mount are infinitesimal (up there with either the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats forming a majority Government after the next election) yet people try twice a week plus the awful scratch cards.

Back to betting shops - they look like the only shops on many High Streets with money. They look bright, inviting and modern in contrast to much of the retail estate around them. They are open from 7.30am to 10pm every day and it seems no High Street can survive without seven or eight of them (if not more). In East Ham, we lost our Hills but still have two Ladbrokes, two BetFred, two Paddy Powers and a Jenningsbet and we aren't the wealthiest area in the world.

Perhaps there's a bit of neo-puritanism out there I don't know but as a punter I can see how it looks and we know the damage addiction to the FOBTs can cause not just to the addict but to those around them. We are already hearing the bleating from Fred Done and others and their unsubtle threats but that's how politics operates now - by threat. Propose anything and those affected threaten all sorts as a way to dissuade policy makers.

Not to mention that if every country where betting is banned, you get illegal betting. Which is the basis of organised crime, usually.

One of the metrics for alcohol pricing/tax is the amount of fake booze that shows up. A few years back there was a spike in people being poisoned by fake vodka. The government responded by not increasing taxes on hard alcohol for a couple of years IIRC.

Yep. Handing over cash is more real than tapping in numbers online. And the idea a problem gambler will have less of a problem if their only avenue is online (especially offshore sites with less commitment to responsible gambling tools) is optimism to a stupid extent.

Meanwhile, the workers in those shops will lose their jobs, sacrificed on a puritanical and innumerate altar of outrage.

If the Government actually wanted to make a significant step in this area they'd ban loot boxes. But as that would require a basic understanding of something related to technology that won't happen.

It's more complex - it's a question of how you view gambling. Some see it as an addiction, others don't. It's a bit like alcohol, I suppose.

Those who have first hand experience of the impacts of those addictions will have a different view.

A lot of Fred Done's comments are threats, bluff and bluster. Yes, he may close a few shops but they will be the ones which are losing money - the betting shop estate, like all other retail estates, is a mix of profitable and unprofitable shops and the Government are providing cover for the bookmakers to divest themselves of the unprofitable parts of their estate.

Non gamblers don't generally mind higher taxes on someone else. Most gamblers don't have any idea how gambling tax works, and anyway regard gambling as a form of entertainment for which a price is paid, with no question of overall making profits (which will remain untaxed!); any gamblers who make big money regularly will gamble offshore.

The real question for the CoE is how to keep a decent slice of the whole industry within UK tax system by ensuring it is overall competitive with Abroadland. There is an obvious logical problem about taxing gambling anyway - it automatically affects the odds setter who need a greater margin simply to break even, which if pushed far enough destroys the economic model of legal gambling, encouraging the illegal market. A bit like fags costing £150 for 20.

It is not that simple. There are an awful lot of anti-gamblers who see high street betting shops and online casinos as blights on their communities and a menace to society. For them, raising taxes is not about raising money, it is about ending gambling. Like fags.

I think Michael Gove was talking recently about the importance of the high street to voters, the feeling that empty shops and gambling shops show country is in decline even if broader economy has a different picture

I think the decline in bricks and mortar retail has a lot to do with people's sense of alienation and national decline, Gove is right. The best way to counter this is to build high density housing. Living in densely populated inner London I have observed that our high streets (Brockley, Nunhead, Peckham, Lewsham), though not without their issues, are in a far better state than those in suburban areas or small towns. The sheer volume of footfall we have, owing to population density, must be a factor.

It is amazing, you're quite right. But that's more about something we think of being rich in ourselves actually being a pretty formulaic thing. Just because it seems to be almost human (but far better informed) makes LLM a substantial dead end that everyone is piling in to. My view anyway.

LLMs have a variety of uses where they're very useful, they're an interesting technology that absolutely does have a future. But, yes, they are not human-type or human-level intelligences the AI industry portrays them as and they never will be.

They will continue to improve in the areas they are already useful in, but anyone expecting them to ever function like a human mind are going to be disappointed. All those CEOs rushing to replace their employees with LLMs are going to look pretty stupid.

Quite a lot of CEOs *are* pretty stupid.

It was a constant refrain of Cyclefree that rather too many of them confused the value of their chair with the value of their input when negotiating their salaries.