Best Of

The Farage claims of all the teachers are indoctorinating our kids and are activists again seems very MAGA and "Online" where the likes of "Libs of TikTok" social media accounts bang on constantly about it.

I don't have kids, but I don't get that the "reds under the beds" scare is something that is part of the UK political discussion around education. Rather behaviour, slipping standards, kids effected by COVID lockdown still not ready to learn are the things that my friends who do have kids bang on about.

I am all in favour of teachers indoctrinating children. FIrst, they could indoctrinate them in the use of the apostrophe, then on the benefits and dangers of compound interest.

The fact that they have not been able to do so to date shows how useless teachers would be at indoctrinating children about anything.

I am starting to wonder if Farage keeps going down the MAGA rabbit hole if that is how he blows up Reforms poll numbers, rather than general talk of anti-immigration, lack of full suite of properly costed policies or talented PPCs and a record of piss poor councillors.

Loads of the MAGA talking points just don't work in the UK.

A lot of people live online. They get their view of the world from algorithmic feeds. The only things they know are what the feeds tell them. When you tell them they're wrong they get huffy and stop believing you. They're American in their heads.

Nikita Khrushchev once said to Nixon: “If people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Farage is building invisible bridges over imaginary rivers and the people love him for it.

The only way we are ever going to get "normal politics" back is to ban algorithmic feeds and go back to subscription feeds. The inability of people to grasp this genuinely worries me. The country is going insane.

Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened

Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'

She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep

And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage

Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both

The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser

I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance

Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?

Pound shop Liz Truss.

No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut

It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators

She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees

Add in banning doctor strikes

This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform

This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.

Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.

Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.

That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.

Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”

It is worth remembering that a number of competences were repatriated from Brussels, and which require civil servants.

Which competences (if that’s a word you can use for recent governments) would require that many staff?

Negotiating trade deals.

Also all of the functions previously done by or shared with, the EU and its agencies, from customs, trademarks, statistics, food safety, Erasmus, aviation control, ESMA, Euratom (now only an associated state, not a member), medicines, maritime safety, Europol, and about 3 dozen other fields .

We saved a lot of money by being an EU member. If you were serious about improving the UK economy, you would be talking about far more alignment or even Brejoin.

I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.

Does anyone have a wider knowledge?

They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.

The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!

Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).

Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown

It depends on why it has been put up on a day other than match day. If it is used like some people use the flag of St George as a symbol that "foreigners" aren't welcome it could be.

Personally, I quite like the England and UK flags. It just feels nice to have my flag flown. This must be what gay people feel like in June and August. Hurray, some people don't despise me.
Only in the UK do we get hot and bothered about people flying national flags. Go to Greece, for example: the Greek flag is everywhere.

I always presumed this was your flag:

Over a third of the boomer retired generation say no party represents them says new YouGov poll.

As Stephen Bush points out - these are the guys that "takes up most government spending".

Frankly, they are being handed ever increasing state largesse on a massive silver plate!

One can make an argument that the group most undeserving of state largesse are people in their late 60s who are still fit and healthy, but getting pensions and other benefits. Should the pension age be further raised?

Pension age should be graduated. Starting at a lower age than current, 63?,at maybe £2k or £3k per year then increasing til maybe 73 to the current rate.

What's the rationale here? That people are expected to be moving to part-time working?

People do move to work part time. And some people retire at 55, others at 80. The days of a single retirement age for everyone are long gone.

People who retire at 55 tend to be very rich people who can afford to, but others need to retire early for health reasons. People who retire at 80 tend to have better paying white collar jobs. So, how does the system handle all these differences? Putting everyone on a graduated system going from 63 to 73 is still a one size fits all solution.

Do we instead need more means testing and/or health status testing?

Be useful and don't abuse your body and you'll have to work longer will be a hard sell.