Best Of

Badenoch going hard on North Sea oil. A good idea but yet again going on energy bills when the issue is TAX REVENUE

TAX REVENUE that can be used to offset energy bills though.

Would that be the North Sea Oil of poor quality that her Government subsidised at huge cost.

The same North Sea Oil that's got to be sold on the global market.

Or is she planning a sneaky straw to suck it ashore in a glorified sucknit yourself scheme.

She has the IQ of a newt

Another load of bollocks from you. North Sea oil from the UK and Norway is some of the highest quality and most valuable in the world. One of the reasons many of us have been saying for many years that it is too good to be burning.

It's quite amusing how PB oil experts crop up to troll you into putting them straight, every so often.

https://xkcd.com/386 applies here, I think.

You’d think that even the experts would notice that one of the key prices for oil is “Brent crude”

Kemi gets it

https://x.com/i/status/2037160209626411229

How does that solve the fuel crisis which will hit in the next 3-6 months?

It will add billions in tax to the treasury over the next 20 years

It shouldn't have been decimated in the first place

Of course it will not add immediately but that is not an excuse not to do it now

It won't add billions. There's no point looking for consistency from Badenoch - I get that - but she's campaigning to reduce the tax burden on North Sea oil

Read @Richard_Tyndall and that is the policy Kemi wants

Our elites now read less than the average member of the population and it shows.

'Britain’s elites no longer look like they did in the 1950s: droopy-moustached old white blokes with a grouse moor somewhere in their background. They are younger, more urban, more multi-ethnic, make rather than inherit their money. That’s all, we may think, to the good. But as The Telegraph’s Great British Class Study discovers, they are less likely than any other sector of society to spend their spare time reading.

For fewer than one in three members of the new “Elite” read for pleasure, according to polling conducted by the opinion-research firm Public First. Too busy with socials, or crypto, or the gym. By contrast, 45 per cent of the “Left Behind” group – whose members typically score the least economic and cultural points in the new system – are readers, as are 60 per cent of the typically older, more financially stable “Quietly Comfortable” class.'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/britains-elites-have-abandoned-intelligence/

I used to read a lot for pleasure.

Then I started reading PB instead.

Yeah, I'm exactly the same. But I feel ambivalent about it. I enjoy the snappy points on PB and the way the arguments develop with many informed contributions but I can't help lamenting how long it is since I read a novel from beginning to end. I seem to be losing the ability to simply be absorbed in a different world and I miss it.

Same. I do audiobooks now. They are immersive and enjoyable but they don't quite 'stick' like trad books used to with me. I think I could get back into books but it would take an effort. Reading in that way has come to feel a bit clunky. It's a shame. I used to devour stuff and time would fly.

Our elites now read less than the average member of the population and it shows.

'Britain’s elites no longer look like they did in the 1950s: droopy-moustached old white blokes with a grouse moor somewhere in their background. They are younger, more urban, more multi-ethnic, make rather than inherit their money. That’s all, we may think, to the good. But as The Telegraph’s Great British Class Study discovers, they are less likely than any other sector of society to spend their spare time reading.

For fewer than one in three members of the new “Elite” read for pleasure, according to polling conducted by the opinion-research firm Public First. Too busy with socials, or crypto, or the gym. By contrast, 45 per cent of the “Left Behind” group – whose members typically score the least economic and cultural points in the new system – are readers, as are 60 per cent of the typically older, more financially stable “Quietly Comfortable” class.'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/britains-elites-have-abandoned-intelligence/

I used to read a lot for pleasure.

Then I started reading PB instead.

Yeah, I'm exactly the same. But I feel ambivalent about it. I enjoy the snappy points on PB and the way the arguments develop with many informed contributions but I can't help lamenting how long it is since I read a novel from beginning to end. I seem to be losing the ability to simply be absorbed in a different world and I miss it.

Same. I do audiobooks now. They are immersive and enjoyable but they don't quite 'stick' like trad books used to with me. I think I could get back into books but it would take an effort. Reading in that way has come to feel a bit clunky. It's a shame. I used to devour stuff and time would fly.

Audiobooks are great. I listen to them on my commute and when going backwards and forwards to the Isle of Wight, but I also enjoy physical books. Even so, I still have quite a backlog of unread books.

I love being well read, and that is my ambition. The world of ideas is so satisfying to explore.

Interesting article Rochdale, but you can't have it both ways. It can't be bad that Ref/Green will fall away AND bad that Lab/Con will remain, surely?

Yes, you can. None of them are any good. None offer solutions to our problems. None are even willing to acknowledge the extent of the our problems because it would cause problems with their "solutions" and make them incoherent.

I remember Thatcher and her 1979 government. We were in serious trouble. Unions were willing to destroy businesses rather than compromise about what was needed to boost productivity. Management was arrogant, patronising and frankly under skilled. More and more of our economy was subject to the public sector mindset, more focused on those that worked for the business than their customers. Changing this was hard, brutal at times, but (with a lot of help from the proceeds of North Sea oil) it worked.

Where is the current Thatcherite solution? Not in any of our politicians, that is for sure.

My tentative suggestions are that we need a repeat of 1980s deregulation. We need to massively cut back on the regulatory state, many of these regulatory bodies should be completely eliminated. We need to protect businesses from their intrusions and allow them to get on with making money. This will make running businesses from here more attractive but we need to do more, giving generous tax allowances for investment both in kit and training. We need to admire and not want to tear down those who want to make money. We need them. We need the jobs that they create. We need the taxes they will pay and we need to accept that some of them will be chancers and wide boys taking advantage. That's ok and we need to not get too het up about it.

I don't see anyone offering anything like this. I don't see anyone who has anything like a workable solution at all.

There it s no 'Thatcherite' solution.
Many of our current problems can be traced back to her curate's egg administrations.

"Deregulation" is fine (and Labour are already making tentative moves in that direction), but the devil as ever is in the detail. And on its own it's unlikely to be any kind of real solution to where we are.

Rochdale is spot on with this:
..Britain’s long term crumbling decline needs to be arrested. A radical rethink is needed of the kinds we have seen in the past – Liberal reforms a century ago, or Labour’s welfare state post-war, or the Thatcher deregulation boom of the 80s.

A change of direction is needed...

But no one has yet identified what that might mean.

Taking a hard look at how other nations build infrastructure for a tenth the price we do and then copy it

Why do we need to do that - can we not just look at how we used to build it for a tenth of the price?

Bat tunnels are a very real consequence of
a) European legislation adopted into British law, and
b) A single issue unaccountable quango set up to enforce that law - with no remit to consider wider implications, no need to face the electorate, and no consequences for the damage they do to the economy.

Undo the legislation, dissolve the quango. Go back to how it was when things did get built.

This stuff isn't rocket science. Half of us just don't want to see it, because it's radically against our notion of good politics - namely that Europe is great, experts are great, and electoral politics is dirty.

Excellent article and I cannot disagree with it.

The thing with inflation is when it is something most people buy week in week out you notice. Be it eggs, peppers, onions or really food in general. It gets really noticed.

If it’s stuff like airline tickets or cinema tickets it’s less noticeable.

This, as we have discussed, will be bad. Very bad.

I’m certainly Reform curious/leaning towards, but their support for this shows me they don’t give a fuck about the effect on the people in the poorer communities (a bit like PB but from a different angle).

You have to detatch the foreign policy arguments (especially given that the war isn't a result of our own policy) from the domestic policy arguments.

Most of the people using this as a stick to beat Reform wouldn't dream of linking support for Ukraine's attacks on Russian energy exports to inflation here.

I believe you are comparing and contrasting two distinctly different things.

Ukraine attacking Russian resources is to stave off an existential event for the country. The US bombing Iranian oil installation on Bibi's whim leading to retaliatory acts in the Kingdom and the Emirates is wholly different and not especially necessary.

Our elites now read less than the average member of the population and it shows.

'Britain’s elites no longer look like they did in the 1950s: droopy-moustached old white blokes with a grouse moor somewhere in their background. They are younger, more urban, more multi-ethnic, make rather than inherit their money. That’s all, we may think, to the good. But as The Telegraph’s Great British Class Study discovers, they are less likely than any other sector of society to spend their spare time reading.

For fewer than one in three members of the new “Elite” read for pleasure, according to polling conducted by the opinion-research firm Public First. Too busy with socials, or crypto, or the gym. By contrast, 45 per cent of the “Left Behind” group – whose members typically score the least economic and cultural points in the new system – are readers, as are 60 per cent of the typically older, more financially stable “Quietly Comfortable” class.'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/britains-elites-have-abandoned-intelligence/

I used to read a lot for pleasure.

Then I started reading PB instead.

Yeah, I'm exactly the same. But I feel ambivalent about it. I enjoy the snappy points on PB and the way the arguments develop with many informed contributions but I can't help lamenting how long it is since I read a novel from beginning to end. I seem to be losing the ability to simply be absorbed in a different world and I miss it.

My late father in law was a prodigious reader but would not read fiction or novels

Farage's anti immigration, anti woke nationalism and Polanski's anti business anti rich socialism are neither solutions to our problems, just tools for them to get votes. Hopefully the crisis will at least see a return to the main parties to provide support as prices rise and as voters move away from Farage's Trump links. Farage is right though we need to drill more of our own oil and shore up our energy supplies and we also need to grow more of our own food

The person leading the drill for oil in the media is Kemi

Unsurprisingly you refer to Farage

Kemi is right on this

She's right and she's wrong. She's right we should be doing it, that it was moronic to ever stop doing it, that it will benefit us in the medium term. She's wrong that it will make any difference to our energy bills in either the short or medium term. There are benefits but they will not be in the price of gas or oil in the UK. The benefits are our balance of payments (one of the problems politicians hate talking about), investment in the UK and the perpetuation of our skills base. Her presentation today was either stupid or dishonest or both.

A rational approach would be to come up an achievable date for Net Zero.

From that, you calculate the point at which hydrocarbon usage for transport ends, the point where hydrocarbon usage for heating ends etc etc.

Note that things like plastic production will create a long, long tail.

This gives you a demand profile.

From this you create an approach to production of oil and gas - heading to zero, but in a planned manner.

Interesting article Rochdale, but you can't have it both ways. It can't be bad that Ref/Green will fall away AND bad that Lab/Con will remain, surely?

Yes, you can. None of them are any good. None offer solutions to our problems. None are even willing to acknowledge the extent of the our problems because it would cause problems with their "solutions" and make them incoherent.

I remember Thatcher and her 1979 government. We were in serious trouble. Unions were willing to destroy businesses rather than compromise about what was needed to boost productivity. Management was arrogant, patronising and frankly under skilled. More and more of our economy was subject to the public sector mindset, more focused on those that worked for the business than their customers. Changing this was hard, brutal at times, but (with a lot of help from the proceeds of North Sea oil) it worked.

Where is the current Thatcherite solution? Not in any of our politicians, that is for sure.

My tentative suggestions are that we need a repeat of 1980s deregulation. We need to massively cut back on the regulatory state, many of these regulatory bodies should be completely eliminated. We need to protect businesses from their intrusions and allow them to get on with making money. This will make running businesses from here more attractive but we need to do more, giving generous tax allowances for investment both in kit and training. We need to admire and not want to tear down those who want to make money. We need them. We need the jobs that they create. We need the taxes they will pay and we need to accept that some of them will be chancers and wide boys taking advantage. That's ok and we need to not get too het up about it.

I don't see anyone offering anything like this. I don't see anyone who has anything like a workable solution at all.

There it s no 'Thatcherite' solution.
Many of our current problems can be traced back to her curate's egg administrations.

"Deregulation" is fine (and Labour are already making tentative moves in that direction), but the devil as ever is in the detail. And on its own it's unlikely to be any kind of real solution to where we are.

Rochdale is spot on with this:
..Britain’s long term crumbling decline needs to be arrested. A radical rethink is needed of the kinds we have seen in the past – Liberal reforms a century ago, or Labour’s welfare state post-war, or the Thatcher deregulation boom of the 80s.

A change of direction is needed...

But no one has yet identified what that might mean.

Actually lots of people have identified what a change of direction would mean.

But they have all identified different directions.

Most of them can be dismissed as impractical (the Greens or some of the nuttier Reform policies), or as not answering the key question we face, which is how to raise the country's long term growth rate (anything left of centre). The rest would work but don't have sufficient political support (e.g. Thatcherism).

So, given the fracutring of our political landscape, the centre ground has so far won by default.

Our elites now read less than the average member of the population and it shows.

'Britain’s elites no longer look like they did in the 1950s: droopy-moustached old white blokes with a grouse moor somewhere in their background. They are younger, more urban, more multi-ethnic, make rather than inherit their money. That’s all, we may think, to the good. But as The Telegraph’s Great British Class Study discovers, they are less likely than any other sector of society to spend their spare time reading.

For fewer than one in three members of the new “Elite” read for pleasure, according to polling conducted by the opinion-research firm Public First. Too busy with socials, or crypto, or the gym. By contrast, 45 per cent of the “Left Behind” group – whose members typically score the least economic and cultural points in the new system – are readers, as are 60 per cent of the typically older, more financially stable “Quietly Comfortable” class.'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/britains-elites-have-abandoned-intelligence/

I used to read a lot for pleasure.

Then I started reading PB instead.

Yeah, I'm exactly the same. But I feel ambivalent about it. I enjoy the snappy points on PB and the way the arguments develop with many informed contributions but I can't help lamenting how long it is since I read a novel from beginning to end. I seem to be losing the ability to simply be absorbed in a different world and I miss it.

My late father in law was a prodigious reader but would not read fiction or novels

I once met someone who would read only the Guiness book of World Records. Cover to cover and repeat.