Best Of

“Kill the IDF” and “fuck the British” rappers Bob Vylan have had their visas revoked and can’t tour the USA. They have also been abandoned by agents and management.

Go woke, go broke

I’m all for free speech and I’m also all for capitalism teaching stiff lessons to hateful morons

I wonder if Glasto will ever quite recover from this

You're falling into the same trap that many 'anti-woke' idiots do: "If I don't like it, it's woke'

What they're saying is in no way woke. If it has any purpose, it is to get them publicity.

"Kill the IDF" and "Fuck the British" is pretty much textbook woke. They just need a "trans women are women" and they've covered all bases.

Trump's America tying itself to the albatross of fossil fuels as China advances at pace into the middle 21st century:


Chris Murphy 🟧

@ChrisMurphyCT
Ok, so Republicans just introduced a 900 page bill none of them have read. But my team is going through it line by line and on this 🧵you can see the hidden provisions we found. Will update all day.


Chris Murphy 🟧

@ChrisMurphyCT
·
2h
2/ It was bad enough they cut all the tax incentives for wind and solar energy - they added a NEW TAX on these projects to make sure America never builds any new renewables.

Remember, Trump promised the oil industry provisions like this in exchange for a $1B campaign donation.

https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1939702968409866471

Wind and solar were the two fastest growing job sectors in the US, IIRC. We should offer a four-year visa for renewables technicians with a possible extension to match this stupidity in the US.

We've got 40GW in the pipeline in Scotland alone - let's get it built now with ambitious young Americans.

FPT:

A stupid version of Cnut.
Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.

Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496

Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?

All authoritarians of right and left have a fetish about Really Big Industry. Something about half naked men pouring STEEEEEEEEL. Dirty faces, BIG CHIMNEYYYYYYYYSSSSSSS!

Which is nuts because the industries of the future will be huge, they are the Really Big Industries of the 2050s and beyond. By which time in any non-mad country the idea that you burn stuff to get electricity when you can get if for "free" from the sky will seem very silly.

Do you expect all energy-intensive industry to move to countries close to the equator?

Solar cells have already fallen in price so far as to ruin the economics of various long distance transmission schemes.

The bit that costs money is the power electronics - but that is scaled by the output, not the number of cells.

So 100 panels in the U.K. doesn’t cost that much more than 10 panels in Morocco. And the differential is still falling.

By some quotes, solar panels are now cheaper than some grades of plywood to cover things… so making a surface to keep the rain out may well default to solar quite soon.

FPT:

A stupid version of Cnut.
Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.

Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496

Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?

It's more the insane economics that impresses me.

But granted, Trump has zero taste, too.

The economic damage Trump is doing is of a scale that might be comparable to a war. Essentially Trump is betting everything on the industries of the past, and hobbling the industries of the future. Short term this might look okay, and will please some areas of industry. Long term the US will be far behind in renewable energy, grid energy storage, electric vehicles, and the industries that underly them; like power semiconductors, batteries, power transmission systems, magnetics, etc.

As the damage is something that is accrued rather than immediate Trump can get away with it, for now at least. Long term he is doing trillions of dollars in damage to the US economy, and handing a huge amount of control to China, who are by far the best positioned country to reap the benefit of America's follies.

Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT

There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.

“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/30/entry-level-jobs-in-free-fall-after-launch-of-chatgpt/

I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.

My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management.
Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.

Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.

There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.

And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.

Did you know that Disney has its own management education center that gives out qualifications: they truly can be called Mickey Mouse degrees.

Morning all! Back after 3 days away at Tankfest.

An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.

I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.

We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/29/britain-in-2025-sick-man-of-europe-battling-untreated-illness-crisis

Morning, PB.

Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.

The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card

Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.

Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.

The problem they had was a structural deficit.

The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.

So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.

Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.

Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?

For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.

How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.

The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?

My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".

None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.

Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.

FPT

Probably one of the tax cuts that'd be the biggest drivers of growth is removing the 100k cliff edge, including the childcare voucher removal, just because it would ensure that many people who currently do 3 or 4 days a week to stay beneath it would suddenly find it worth their while to do 5 days or take a new job in the 100-125k band and we'd get a major economic boost.

I entirely agree with the principle, but only about 2% (might be higher now) earn that much. It's not going to have the transformative effect on growth you think it will.

Ultimately, sustainable growth outside the City is going to depend on median earners and medium sized businesses. The government should be focused on that part of the distribution, even if they iron out some of the weird tax blips that affect the very highest earners.

It's approaching the top 5% now but the top 2% pay 39% (and rising) of all income tax. So, yes, it's significant if a good chunk of them decide not to work more, not work much at all, or work overseas. And the message it sends to entrepreneurs both at home, and looking to invest here from overseas, is that Britain is open to and interested in rewarding success - unlocking energy & growth.

Sustainable growth depending on median earners and median businesses sounds nice and fair, but it's not especially true, even if they are the mode in number.

Fundamentally, growth is driven by wealth creators and a economic environment that rewards success. We have two quasi-socialist policies that are starting to be venerated: one, in the public sector, is the PM salary cap - meaning they can no longer pay market rates to hire the best people in major public sector bodies - and, two, the 100k cliff edge from 2009 (62k in today's prices) means your Jeff Bezos and can be taxed until the pips squeak.

Both are making us poorer.

But it's not even that 2% or 5% affected by the cliff edge, as has been shown to you. Jeff Bezos is not affected by it, as he earns rather more than it.

And I agree that the the proportion of all income tax that is paid by the top 5% is absolutely ridiculous. But given the top rate of tax is only 45%, and 40% from £50k to £125k, that's a function of enormous income inequality, not punitive tax rates.

And it's not about being "nice and fair". 90% of the UK population earn less than £70k - if you want to generate meaningful growth, you're going to have to bring along some of them as well simply by weight of numbers. We see exactly this attitude around London, which the economy is now so reliant on but also why we've generated such massive regional inequalities.

https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/02/02/a-tale-of-twelve-cities-the-perplexing-underperformance-of-britains-second-tier/

The regional mayors still don't have enough authority and tax / spending / borrowing powers.

to be blunt - until Manchester and Birmingham can raise money to build the metro / underground rail / tram systems and other things they desperately need we will remain a low growth centralised country.

(FPT)

The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.

So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?

Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?

The problem is that recessions are part of the economic cycle and should be accounted for in the cycle. The cycle should be debt rising during and immediately after the recession, then falling afterwards, before the next one hits again.

The problem is Gordon Brown claimed (falsely) to have abolished boom and bust and broke the cycle. He may have abolished booms, but busts still happen, as they inevitably always will.

When the recession hit in 2008 we should have had falling debt-to-GDP and a budget surplus, as we did in 2002. It was a political choice, not economics or a cycle, that meant we had rising debt-to-GDP even before the financial crisis hit.

That was a catastrophic mistake.

In 2020 we didn't have a budget surplus but we at least had falling debt-to-GDP in the preceding years, so the impact of a global pandemic ended up being less than the impact of a fairly routine economic crisis in 2008, as we weren't so horrifically exposed with rising debt even before the crisis hit.

We have talked before about the over medication and prescribed addictions in this country. 43% of Labour voters think this government has things under control? I want some of what they are having for a happier life.

More alarmingly, 18% of the population, 1 in 5, think things are under control. That means that on my next jury of 15 there are probably 3 members who are utterly delusional.

Let me guess, do you read the daily mail or the telegraph?

When you have to fire pointless little barbs in the direction of DavidL, you are shilling for a government that is in deep, deep trouble.

We know who you shill for though...

I really don't think you do. My inclinations are still largely to the Right, but not of Reform.

I'm enjoying having no responsibility for the current governmen shit show. You?