Best Of

A resounding win and Burnham succeeding Starmer by the end of summer would be my preferred outcome

Politics has to change and it starts with Starmer leaving office

Reeves too. We desperately need a Chancellor with a sense of purpose.

Reeves has actually done exceptionally well on the fiscal side with golden rules.

Her problem like Starmer's is they have no political nous.

Conversely a dream team of Burnham and Streeting would lack in deep thinking of policy but are outstanding communication wise and do the day to day politics very very well.

The 10 year gilt is 4.88%. The ECB 10 year bond yields 3.38%. That 1.5% differential is killing us. It makes investment and mortgages more expensive. It comes from having a less credible fiscal strategy, higher inflation, no clear path to improve things and a willingness to keep doing things that cause more harm than good.

If you honestly believe this is "exceptionally well" you need to reset your sights and aspirations.

From another point of view it also is from not being in the Euro.

Or a much higher tax burden.

I’m only half joking. I think European countries don’t suffer from the same fiscal delusion we do. The argument for a larger state has been made and won, while we’re still deluding ourselves about low taxes - and thereby introducing all sorts of silly ones to disguise it.

(It’s mainly the risk sharing from the Euro and obstinate institutions though - much more difficult for a European wide Truss scenario to happen.)

a

Fpt:

It seems that the Hampshire plods attempted to libel a murder victim:

An initial police statement later that morning said: “It was reported two men had been assaulted by an unknown man.”

The Nowak family, raw with grief, became concerned that a false narrative was being pushed about their son. It is understood that police told the family the next update they planned to publish, which would include the Nowaks’ tribute, would again imply that he was the initial aggressor.

Officers dropped that section of the statement, which only referred to an “altercation” when published.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/henry-nowak-murder-trial-police-l8x990pkb

What’s happening with the Hillsborough Law? Feels like something Andy Burnham could capitalise on here.

In further echoes of Hillsborough, I see that the victims of the Nottingham attack were tested for drugs:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ywd4gdzk1o

The father of a university student killed trying to protect her friend has told a public inquiry of his "disgust" that the stabbing victims were tested for drugs and alcohol - but their attacker was not.

The theme which runs through the Nowak murder, the Nottingham murders, the Southport murders and the Fordingbridge rapes is DEI.

With the criminals deemed to need 'equity' even if that requires demeaning the victims.

This case has SFA to do with DEI.

Reverse the ethnicity of the murderer and murder victim and do you think the plods would have reacted in the same way ?

We all know that they wouldn't.

tell that to the Lawrence family

The pattern of “we fucked up - blame the victim” repeats endlessly.

The only change is in the ingroups and outgroups.

If I'm faced with Starmer v Burnham on the leadership ballot, it will be time to draw a cock and balls.

So who would you want? As I said down thread it is a lot easier to say what you don't like than to find anything you do. Who would you want our next PM to be?

I want rid of Starmer, as I think he is just rubbish at politics.

I don't want Burnham, as I can't stand his sense of entitlement.

My choice would be one of Mahmood or Phillipson. Two capable women, who could do a much better job than Starmer of setting a direction and selling it to the nation.

Thanks. As a disillusioned Tory I have been quite impressed with Mahmood in the last few months.

Reminds me of Rory Stewart running for Tory leader. As a non-Tory, I liked him. Mahmood is implementing policies Priti Patel would have found extreme. She would drive away the left and centre of the Labour vote. Starmer has already found out being Reform-lite doesn't work.

Buy shares in bat tunnels.

Britain is to unleash a major new wave of corporatism, in which the state will “aggressively” take larger stakes in fast-growing private sector firms to jump-start economic growth.

Business secretary Peter Kyle will use London Tech Week, starting on Monday, to set out his vision for rebooting the economy. Billions of pounds of previously announced taxpayer aid will be used to take bigger stakes in the country’s next winners. This will result in UK taxpayers owning far more of privately owned businesses than has previously been the case.

“You are going to start to see us take more risks, upping the risk threshold in our desire to back British innovation as it scales. I want us to be aggressively ambitious,” he told The Sunday Times.

https://www.thetimes.com/business/companies-markets/article/peter-kyle-state-aggressive-stakes-uk-firms-0xj7krng7

And who is this Peter Kyle who will soon be cosplaying Musk and Bezos with taxpayers money ?

By the age of 25, he was accepted on his third attempt to become a student at the University of Sussex, where he gained a degree in geography, international development, and environmental studies, and later a doctorate in community development.

After university, Kyle worked as an aid worker and as a project director for the charity Children on the Edge in Eastern Europe and the Balkans helping young people whose lives had been affected by the political instability created by the Bosnian War and Kosovan War, helping to establish an orphanage in Romania.

In 2006, Kyle became a Cabinet Office special adviser focusing on social exclusion policy.

From 2007 to 2013, he was deputy chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO). In 2013, he became chief executive of Working for Youth, a newly formed charity focusing on helping unemployed youth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kyle

Standard fare in Europe although America prefers straight subsidies development contracts from NASA or other branches of government.

To save time, I will write the report for the enquiry

1) The government invested to heavily in picking winners rather than a spread across the solutions in a space
2) political considerations (fits the message grid) and favouritism vs viability
3) excessive paperwork without actual checking. So fraudsters stole and real companies were left with a massive burden. The response to fraud was not inspection but more paperwork.
4) often an inadequate investment was tied to irrelevant attempts to constrain the company to enact various government policies that were irrelevant to the actual technology.
5) 3&4 became a massive disincentive to non-government investment, leading to a higher rate of failure.

A resounding win and Burnham succeeding Starmer by the end of summer would be my preferred outcome

Politics has to change and it starts with Starmer leaving office

Maybe but Starmer to Burnham is a shift even further left for Labour, Burnham is a better communicator than Starmer but Burnham would also likely be the most leftwing UK PM since Harold Wilson

Burnham is many things to many people and he will be restrained by the bond markets

I expect him to be less tribal and more collegiate but we will have to see

First of all he has to win Makerfield and then see Starmer either resign or lose in a leadership ballot

If he raises taxes to fund spending and nationalise the bond markets can't say it wasn't unfunded even if it hits growth.

The bond markets are only relevant if he was trying extensive unfunded borrowing as Truss was