Best Of

I agree with OGH junior.

Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.

Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!

Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.

As an aside: this simply isn’t true.

I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.

IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.

Something I can't prove but strongly suspect:

Most of us don't really internalise/grock the difference between capital and revenue spending. That big X as a one-off can be cheaper than smaller x every year forever.

And that misconception explains most of the pickle that humanity in general and Britain especially, is in.

Rachel Reeves is doing quite spectacularly badly

She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.

She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing

If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin

But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.

EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.

You've got a thing about this hair colour change, haven't you? My better half, a distinguished and beautiful lady of a certain age, and far from a self-obsessed teenager, has had blonde, white, red and brown hair in the time I've known her - each one splendid in its own way. It's freedom of expression.

Mind you, we are in Brighton, so anything goes.

I do, yes.
Partly it's just me. I have a preference for a more utilitarian aesthetic, a suspicion of vanity and a distaste for flamboyance. (When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s this attitude was just standard* and I'm puzzled that modern Brits not only spend so much time, money and discomfort on their own appearance (nail bars! tanning salons! botox! lip filler!) but actually don't subject this sort of thing to the relentless mockery it deserves. I'm actually a bit odd about this: I don't even like cosmetics, and lipstick actually promotes a sort of physical disgust reflex in me.
But also, she's CoE. It's not the sort of thing you expect a CoE to do.

*and yes, the counterexample of e.g. the New Romantics is always given, but they were on the fringes of society, and widely mocked (rightly so in my view!)

You've clearly forgotten the period 1889-1894 when then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Viscount Hexham, GCMG, OM, experimented with a ginger-and-peach Afro and had FUCK ALL COPS tattooed on his face, causing a temporary stir in the Atheneaum

I was quite impressed with Badenoch's stirring speech about downtrodden workers and the nation's indebtedness for their labours

The miners strike might have turned out so differently if we'd had Kemi on board.

Kemi can also back the miners now too after Ed Miliband scrapped what would have been the last mine left in the UK in Cumbria

Thatcher closing hundreds of uneconomic mines in the dash for gas, was genius. Miliband closes an uneconomic mine and he's a traitor.

FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.

He didn't scrap a mine, he refused permission for a new one that clearly would have been profitable (otherwise someone wouldn't have been desperate to build it) and met all the current bollocks that these projects have to meet.

He is a repellent toad who doesn't want the UK to succeed.

Rachel Reeves is doing quite spectacularly badly

She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.

She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing

If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin

But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.

EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.