As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
It is all very sad.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
Boris is actually left of Cameron on economics and much more of a big spender.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right too.
It took 8 years in opposition and 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
Has anyone thought of a PB North gathering? Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...? Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
level up!
Several pints of mild in a WMC. With chips and gravy.
Sounds miles better than Prosecco in Whitechapel with Leon. Still a bit too far south for my tastes by about 200 miles. Perhaps a distillery tour followed by a haggis pie.
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
It is all very sad.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
Boris is actually left of Cameron on economics and much more of a big spender.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right.
It took 8 years in opposition add 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour too to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
You're very probably right, which is unfortunate.
Because one of the ironest laws of politics is that when a party doesn't even try for the centre ground, it loses.
But yes- it normally takes 5-10 years for a party to acknowledge that. Shame, really.
Has anyone thought of a PB North gathering? Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...? Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
If we extend our net over the Pennines we can include Sandy Rentool and David Herdson...
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
It is all very sad.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
Boris is actually left of Cameron on economics and much more of a big spender.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right too.
It took 8 years in opposition and 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
So you agree with my post? The party DID do something different than what it traditionally does that Autumn 19? the party DID change its DNA - and you concede it is weaker at politics today for the loss of so many experienced and talented moderate conservatives, at every level of the party?
Latest NZ poll has Jacinda’s Labour Party behind for the first time since…???
Labour 33.0% (-2.5% from December) National 35.0% (+3.5%) Greens 10.5% (+2.0%) ACT 13.5% (-5.0%) Maori 2.5% (+1.5%) NZ First 2.5% (+0.5%)
This poll would allow National/Act to govern.
No general election due in New Zealand though for 2 years so a long way to go.
Ardern also still leads as preferred PM
Yes, even on this poll NAT+ACT would be only 4 seats ahead of LAB+GRN+MRI. National probably has made a mistake in not bringing back Simon Bridges as a caretaker leader given that it will still be a large challenge for National to win the 2023 election.
Has anyone thought of a PB North gathering? Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...? Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
level up!
Several pints of mild in a WMC. With chips and gravy.
Now in principle that sounds great. But I must admit I don't like mild. Always tastes sour to me.
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
Some time ago I spoke to one of the 21 who lost the whip. He said he would have done the same if he had been Pm - the 21 had defied the government and left them with no choice
Even if what you are saying is true, the fact is many moderates, at all levels in the party, who weren’t even sanctioned, walked away as Cummings and Boris fashioned a different kind of Right wing populist party built around the charisma of the populist leader. Even if what you are saying is true, was that not the moment the Conservative Party, the natural party of government in this country, did something very different than it traditionally does?
I don't buy into this "natural party of government" guff.
Even though 20th was the Conservatives century? Even with totting up the wins and years in power since Labour became the main opposition? Surely the stats prove it isn’t guff?
There always was something wrong with us agreeing with each other. I felt dirty. 😆
The Conservatives have been dominant for a long while, but that's far from saying the "natural" party of government. There's nothing inevitable in politics. When the narodists and socialists "went to the people" in the 1870s they found a conservative peasantry who were as likely to have these weirdo arrested then anything else. 30 years later and Russia was in revolt against the tsar and in another decade or so was a fully communist state. The Russians loved their Romanov dynasty that had been around since the early 1600s, until they suddenly didn't.
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
It is all very sad.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
Boris is actually left of Cameron on economics and much more of a big spender.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right too.
It took 8 years in opposition and 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
So you agree with my post? The party DID do something different than what it traditionally does that Autumn 19? the party DID change its DNA - and you concede it is weaker at politics today for the loss of so many experienced and talented moderate conservatives, at every level of the party?
As I said Boris is left of Cameron on economics, indeed on economics Boris is the most moderate Tory leader since Heath. He is only more populist right than Cameron and May.
Once Boris goes the party will become a bit more Thatcherite economically under Sunak or Truss but if they lose expect the party to move even further to the populist right than under Boris in opposition as well.
Boris has lost some Remainers and social liberals but many of them are fiscally dry, not necessarily moderates at all. It is when the Tories lose a general election the party may really move away from moderates for a period in opposition
Has anyone thought of a PB North gathering? Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...? Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
level up!
Several pints of mild in a WMC. With chips and gravy.
Now in principle that sounds great. But I must admit I don't like mild. Always tastes sour to me.
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
Some time ago I spoke to one of the 21 who lost the whip. He said he would have done the same if he had been Pm - the 21 had defied the government and left them with no choice
Even if what you are saying is true, the fact is many moderates, at all levels in the party, who weren’t even sanctioned, walked away as Cummings and Boris fashioned a different kind of Right wing populist party built around the charisma of the populist leader. Even if what you are saying is true, was that not the moment the Conservative Party, the natural party of government in this country, did something very different than it traditionally does?
I don't buy into this "natural party of government" guff.
Even though 20th was the Conservatives century? Even with totting up the wins and years in power since Labour became the main opposition? Surely the stats prove it isn’t guff?
There always was something wrong with us agreeing with each other. I felt dirty. 😆
The Conservatives have been dominant for a long while, but that's far from saying the "natural" party of government. There's nothing inevitable in politics. When the narodists and socialists "went to the people" in the 1870s they found a conservative peasantry who were as likely to have these weirdo arrested then anything else. 30 years later and Russia was in revolt against the tsar and in another decade or so was a fully communist state. The Russians loved their Romanov dynasty that had been around since the early 1600s, until they suddenly didn't.
I don’t agree with much in that post Farooq 😘
The Decembrists nearly removed the monarchy and would have prevented the authoritarian and oppressive century in Russia under the last Tzar’s.
I like the way you cunningly moved the debate from UK to Russia politics 😆
However, I do give a nod to your Conservative peasantry, because in the late 1910ses and early 20s, it wasn’t as simple as Red v White there were the greens - not environmentalists, but those who lived out in the sticks warring against whites and reds.
“ The Green armies were semi-organized local militias that opposed the Bolsheviks, Whites, and foreign interventionists, and fought to protect their communities from requisitions or reprisals carried out by third parties.”
Has anyone thought of a PB North gathering? Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...? Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
Thank you for thinking of me, but I quite like hiding behind the anonymity of the interwebs. I don't go to most work functions either! I'm not the social butterfly really.
Truss’ aircraft (a 146) not spending the night in Moscow - popped over to Lithuania which might have her cool her heels if Lavrov cancels her meeting tomorrow because of her “tone”:
Truss’ aircraft (a 146) not spending the night in Moscow - popped over to Lithuania which might have her cool her heels if Lavrov cancels her meeting tomorrow because of her “tone”:
On the eve of UK Foreign Sec Liz Truss's meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Russia says Britain used Skripal poisoning "tragedy for their own provocative purposes," blaming it for the low water mark in London-Moscow relation
Truss’ aircraft (a 146) not spending the night in Moscow - popped over to Lithuania which might have her cool her heels if Lavrov cancels her meeting tomorrow because of her “tone”:
On the eve of UK Foreign Sec Liz Truss's meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Russia says Britain used Skripal poisoning "tragedy for their own provocative purposes," blaming it for the low water mark in London-Moscow relation
I can't argue with any of this from Nellist. Have I become a Trot? Or is he going to do better than we expect?
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington @Dave4Erdington Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
Hm. This is an issue in Manchester too - I put the LD victory in Ancoats and Beswick ward down to this very issue.
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them. I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one. I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre). Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered. So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
Interesting - thanks Cookie. I grew up in Copenhagen, where the tower blocks of social housing and the tower blocks of private housing were very similar and very high quality. I was taken aback when I came back to Britain and discovered what people thought of tower blocks here.
In Waverley, where I'm since last month the portfolio holder for social and "affordable" housing, we have the same issue but differently shaped. We are reviewing the strategy, and I'm thinking of doing what you warn against - requiring a fairly high proportion of housing (25%?) in new developments at around 60% of market rates. Most of the area is one of the wealthiest in Britain, but there are deprived pockets and there's a need for cheaper housing for the next generation and key workers - people simply can't afford to work in junior positions in a shop/school/hospital or study to the local college, so they commute from far away, which is just bad all round. So we think that developers will be up for it, since the profit they make on the rest of the development will be impressive (the usual issues of sequencing will be important). We've almost never experienced an area of building land that builders weren't fighting to develop, because a large part of the borough is AONB or at least green belt.
Do message me if you've further thoughts. I'd like to get it right, in a non-partisan way.
Just stumbled across a pretty good substack blog page on politics and current affairs. Never heard of the writer before. Has anyone else been reading this? Doesn't seem particularly partisan.
I can't argue with any of this from Nellist. Have I become a Trot? Or is he going to do better than we expect?
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington @Dave4Erdington Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
Hm. This is an issue in Manchester too - I put the LD victory in Ancoats and Beswick ward down to this very issue.
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them. I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one. I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre). Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered. So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
Interesting - thanks Cookie. I grew up in Copenhagen, where the tower blocks of social housing and the tower blocks of private housing were very similar and very high quality. I was taken aback when I came back to Britain and discovered what people thought of tower blocks here.
In Waverley, where I'm since last month the portfolio holder for social and "affordable" housing, we have the same issue but differently shaped. We are reviewing the strategy, and I'm thinking of doing what you warn against - requiring a fairly high proportion of housing (25%?) in new developments at around 60% of market rates. Most of the area is one of the wealthiest in Britain, but there are deprived pockets and there's a need for cheaper housing for the next generation and key workers - people simply can't afford to work in junior positions in a shop/school/hospital or study to the local college, so they commute from far away, which is just bad all round. So we think that developers will be up for it, since the profit they make on the rest of the development will be impressive (the usual issues of sequencing will be important). We've almost never experienced an area of building land that builders weren't fighting to develop, because a large part of the borough is AONB or at least green belt.
Do message me if you've further thoughts. I'd like to get it right, in a non-partisan way.
I've often wondered why other countries don't just copy the Nordic way of doing things. You'd need to raise taxes a bit though.
BBC axes show about £6m local hero over online currency 'scam' after some investors complained that it had been taken in and fallen victim to 'fraud'
It is understood it had filmed the documentary, We Are England: Birmingham’s Self-Made Crypto-Millionaire, in September and edited it before the currency collapsed.
A source at the corporation said the BBC was ‘investigating’ and ‘taking it very seriously’. Another senior BBC insider described the incident as ‘exasperating’.
Truss’ aircraft (a 146) not spending the night in Moscow - popped over to Lithuania which might have her cool her heels if Lavrov cancels her meeting tomorrow because of her “tone”:
Just stumbled across a pretty good substack blog page on politics and current affairs. Never heard of the writer before. Has anyone else been reading this? Doesn't seem particularly partisan.
Truss’ aircraft (a 146) not spending the night in Moscow - popped over to Lithuania which might have her cool her heels if Lavrov cancels her meeting tomorrow because of her “tone”:
Has anyone thought of a PB North gathering? Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...? Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
level up!
Several pints of mild in a WMC. With chips and gravy.
Sounds miles better than Prosecco in Whitechapel with Leon. Still a bit too far south for my tastes by about 200 miles. Perhaps a distillery tour followed by a haggis pie.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Boris is not an austerity hawk, which is a start.
As I said, beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
You say that Boris Johnson opposes austerity. Fine. But I’d like to know what he is *for*, not what he is *against*.
Against:
Business Austerity International trade SMEs
For:
Higher tax burden Barriers to trade White elephant infrastructure projects Promoting Paultons Park Home of Peppa Pig World to a CBI meeting
Forgive me if I’m unimpressed.
Meet Mr Inflation and Mrs Falling Real Wages. You are about to become very, very well acquainted.
I can't argue with any of this from Nellist. Have I become a Trot? Or is he going to do better than we expect?
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington @Dave4Erdington Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
Hm. This is an issue in Manchester too - I put the LD victory in Ancoats and Beswick ward down to this very issue.
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them. I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one. I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre). Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered. So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
Interesting - thanks Cookie. I grew up in Copenhagen, where the tower blocks of social housing and the tower blocks of private housing were very similar and very high quality. I was taken aback when I came back to Britain and discovered what people thought of tower blocks here.
In Waverley, where I'm since last month the portfolio holder for social and "affordable" housing, we have the same issue but differently shaped. We are reviewing the strategy, and I'm thinking of doing what you warn against - requiring a fairly high proportion of housing (25%?) in new developments at around 60% of market rates. Most of the area is one of the wealthiest in Britain, but there are deprived pockets and there's a need for cheaper housing for the next generation and key workers - people simply can't afford to work in junior positions in a shop/school/hospital or study to the local college, so they commute from far away, which is just bad all round. So we think that developers will be up for it, since the profit they make on the rest of the development will be impressive (the usual issues of sequencing will be important). We've almost never experienced an area of building land that builders weren't fighting to develop, because a large part of the borough is AONB or at least green belt.
Do message me if you've further thoughts. I'd like to get it right, in a non-partisan way.
@Cookie@NickPalmer Interesting discussion. I just wanted to recommend the book 'Municipal Dreams; the rise and fall of social housing' by John Boughton. It is a very interesting history of how Council housing has evolved over the years.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Boris is not an austerity hawk, which is a start.
Useless if the cost of extra spending is funded by the wrong people in the wrong way. Which it is, and will continue to be.
I can't argue with any of this from Nellist. Have I become a Trot? Or is he going to do better than we expect?
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington @Dave4Erdington Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
Hm. This is an issue in Manchester too - I put the LD victory in Ancoats and Beswick ward down to this very issue.
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them. I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one. I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre). Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered. So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
I live in ‘post war social housing’ (1968) on an estate that mostly dated from 1954, although about 50% has been demolished and rebuilt with new housing.
It’s very nice. Three bedrooms, large kitchen, enormous living room, garage joined to the main house (admittedly I added the passage, the conservatory and the annexe I use as an office).
It’s also very solidly built and therefore, bizarrely, more energy efficient than its newer counterparts in the same street.
Not quite sure why you tar all postwar housing with the same brush. Surely it depends to a great extent on who built it and what specs they had in mind? Here in Cannock they seem to have built for quality. I can tell you that by contrast in Coleford or Newent they didn’t.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
I was once interviewed by them as, according to them, an essential witness in a LIBOR trial. This was bollocks on stilts. The interview was amateurishly bad. I was told to expect to be called as a witness the day I was due to go the Hampton Court flower show. I was furious. At the last minute prosecution counsel finally read the statement and told the SFO not to be so bloody silly and I was stood down.
I just don't know why they are so bad. But it really hampers our ability to deal with financial crime effectively enough - and has done for years.
When something is really bad for a long time, despite being supposedly important, then my general assumption is that it being bad is actually of some bizarre benefit to decision makers. That despite the right comments there is no will to actually fix it as it would be too much hassle, or cause a fuss with something.
As @Cyclefree has pointed out before we are uniquely bad at prosecuting fraud compared to other crimes. And it seems we are far from alone.
Our family watched the Tinder Swindler last night on Netflix. A simply superb documentary, very well put together, about someone who ran a Ponzi scheme online by which he extravegantly impressed one woman after another using the money of his previous relationships to fund the current. He committed large scale fraud amounting to at least $10m in 7 or 8 countries, some of whom put out warrants for him but none of whom seemed to treat it particularly seriously.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
It is all very sad.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
Boris is actually left of Cameron on economics and much more of a big spender.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right too.
It took 8 years in opposition and 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
So you agree with my post? The party DID do something different than what it traditionally does that Autumn 19? the party DID change its DNA - and you concede it is weaker at politics today for the loss of so many experienced and talented moderate conservatives, at every level of the party?
Not at all.
No offence to you or your dad but it's Remain extremist nonsense to claim that "moderates" were purged in Autumn 19. Or that anything different happened in Autumn 19 to the past.
There's been an attempt by the extremist Remainers to rebrand themselves as "moderate" but there's nothing moderate about the likes of Dominic Grieve being elected promising to respect the referendum result then working night and day to overturn it and rejecting every single leave option.
Furthermore there's nothing new either. What Boris did in Autumn 19 was make not extending Article 50 a "confidence" issue and anyone who votes against the government on a confidence issue is automatically expelled. That's not without precedence, it's the same trick that John Major (with Ken Clarke in the Cabinet) pulled with the Maastricht Treaty to force the Maastricht rebels to vote for it. And no the passing of the ridiculous fixed term Parliament Act doesn't change the precedence or principle.
The only difference between Autumn 19 and Maastricht is that all but one of John Major's "bastards" backed down when he called Maastricht a confidence issue, the one who didn't vote for it was expelled from the Party despite being out of the country. The Autumn 19 so-called misnamed "moderates" went further than the "bastards" did even voting against once it was a confidence motion.
They knew the consequences. It was their choice to vote against. Nothing new except that the die hard Remainers moderated their behaviour even less than the Bastards.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Although I concur with the gist of you post (and gave it a Like), I fear that it is a typical politician’s perspective. Yes, we can all express opinions about the best way to *spend* taxpayers’ money (you cite pensions and healthcare), and which taxpayers pay what. However, the dire economic fundamentals ahead require leadership who care how we *earn* wealth.
As I said above, beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse. I’d like to know what he is *for*, not what he is *against*.
Against:
Business Austerity International trade SMEs
For:
Higher tax burden Barriers to trade White elephant infrastructure projects Promoting Paultons Park Home of Peppa Pig World to a CBI meeting
It’s not just the English nationalist, populist, cult* Government that might finally be under serious threat, it is the entire economy.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
Not quite sure why you tar all postwar housing with the same brush. Surely it depends to a great extent on who built it and what specs they had in mind? Here in Cannock they seem to have built for quality. I can tell you that by contrast in Coleford or Newent they didn’t.
Mmm -- the ex-council housing I rented in Cambridge before I moved here was pretty good. In particular it had two good sized bedrooms and a fair sized bathroom. A for-profit developer would have squeezed one good, one medium and one barely-big-enough-for-a-bed room into that space, and produced a worse house as a result...
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
I can't argue with any of this from Nellist. Have I become a Trot? Or is he going to do better than we expect?
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington @Dave4Erdington Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
Hm. This is an issue in Manchester too - I put the LD victory in Ancoats and Beswick ward down to this very issue.
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them. I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one. I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre). Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered. So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
Interesting - thanks Cookie. I grew up in Copenhagen, where the tower blocks of social housing and the tower blocks of private housing were very similar and very high quality. I was taken aback when I came back to Britain and discovered what people thought of tower blocks here.
In Waverley, where I'm since last month the portfolio holder for social and "affordable" housing, we have the same issue but differently shaped. We are reviewing the strategy, and I'm thinking of doing what you warn against - requiring a fairly high proportion of housing (25%?) in new developments at around 60% of market rates. Most of the area is one of the wealthiest in Britain, but there are deprived pockets and there's a need for cheaper housing for the next generation and key workers - people simply can't afford to work in junior positions in a shop/school/hospital or study to the local college, so they commute from far away, which is just bad all round. So we think that developers will be up for it, since the profit they make on the rest of the development will be impressive (the usual issues of sequencing will be important). We've almost never experienced an area of building land that builders weren't fighting to develop, because a large part of the borough is AONB or at least green belt.
Do message me if you've further thoughts. I'd like to get it right, in a non-partisan way.
@Cookie@NickPalmer Interesting discussion. I just wanted to recommend the book 'Municipal Dreams; the rise and fall of social housing' by John Boughton. It is a very interesting history of how Council housing has evolved over the years.
Cookie’s post resonates for me. Councillors - Labour councillors in particular - get very exercised about the “minimum percentage” of affordable housing that goes into their planning documents, while being remarkably disinterested in what gets built in practice. Having gone for the 25% figure, I believe I am right in saying that during Labour’s first four years in control of my former council, not a single new social housing unit got built at all. The practical effect of a significant affordable percentage in a high value property area seems to be as a hurdle for developers to overcome in negotiation with the council (it may also be to discourage development, but this is hard to assess). Of course, this may have delivered a few extra £ for the council’s general budgets, but it certainly appeared to do nothing for housing need.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
I remember the day I drove to WIck for a case. When I left Dundee my mortgage was 12% but by the time it arrived it was 15%. There wasn't so much talk radio in those days but I listened to the news bulletins every hour with increasing disbelief. Black Wednesday it was called. Thankfully, the interest rate came down again the next day but only to 14% as I recall. That was genuinely scary and something I remember vividly when people talk about being worried by a 0.25% increase.
I can't argue with any of this from Nellist. Have I become a Trot? Or is he going to do better than we expect?
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington @Dave4Erdington Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
Hm. This is an issue in Manchester too - I put the LD victory in Ancoats and Beswick ward down to this very issue.
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them. I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one. I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre). Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered. So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
My dad worked for Manchester City Council's housing department, managing increasingly large housing estates. His perspectives were that whatever the council did each estate had a handful of feral families who would destroy the environment for everyone else. The council and the police would try and intervene but you can't educate scum not to be scum and even when they crossed the line and got evicted the council legally had to rehome them.
That and the realities of a 1980s council doing incompetence on a grand scale...
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
Not much until the fixed rates roll off… but not sure that a UK citizen is the marginal buyer in parts of the country so there may be a regional dimension
As promised. As well as making the two greatest bowls of tagliatelle ever, I have spoken to my dad about Conservative politics 🙂
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
It is all very sad.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
Boris is actually left of Cameron on economics and much more of a big spender.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right too.
It took 8 years in opposition and 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
So you agree with my post? The party DID do something different than what it traditionally does that Autumn 19? the party DID change its DNA - and you concede it is weaker at politics today for the loss of so many experienced and talented moderate conservatives, at every level of the party?
Not at all.
No offence to you or your dad but it's Remain extremist nonsense to claim that "moderates" were purged in Autumn 19. Or that anything different happened in Autumn 19 to the past.
There's been an attempt by the extremist Remainers to rebrand themselves as "moderate" but there's nothing moderate about the likes of Dominic Grieve being elected promising to respect the referendum result then working night and day to overturn it and rejecting every single leave option.
Furthermore there's nothing new either. What Boris did in Autumn 19 was make not extending Article 50 a "confidence" issue and anyone who votes against the government on a confidence issue is automatically expelled. That's not without precedence, it's the same trick that John Major (with Ken Clarke in the Cabinet) pulled with the Maastricht Treaty to force the Maastricht rebels to vote for it. And no the passing of the ridiculous fixed term Parliament Act doesn't change the precedence or principle.
The only difference between Autumn 19 and Maastricht is that all but one of John Major's "bastards" backed down when he called Maastricht a confidence issue, the one who didn't vote for it was expelled from the Party despite being out of the country. The Autumn 19 so-called misnamed "moderates" went further than the "bastards" did even voting against once it was a confidence motion.
They knew the consequences. It was their choice to vote against. Nothing new except that the die hard Remainers moderated their behaviour even less than the Bastards.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
Absolutely - not just the rates, but the looser lending rules, the state subsidy and tax holidays, our openness to foreign investment (and lack of curiosity as to where such money comes from) and the low (by international standards) fixed costs of sitting on property.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
That will be the same day. And almost no one was on fixed rates in those days either so the impact was much more immediate. Today the Bank has much less of an instant grip on consumption.
On topic sadly I won't be able to make the gathering. Op (nothing dramatic) on 24th Feb which will see me pretty immobile for a few weeks. Is there a donate button I can use so people can have a glass of medium sweet white wine on me (and a vol au vent or cheese and pineapple chunk on a stick if they are on offer).
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
That will be the same day. And almost no one was on fixed rates in those days either so the impact was much more immediate. Today the Bank has much less of an instant grip on consumption.
Having the Bank themselves set rates, in sober monthly meetings, rather than the Chancellor, also helps things. One of Gordon Brown’s few good decisions, alongside not getting involved in the ERM again!
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
That will be the same day. And almost no one was on fixed rates in those days either so the impact was much more immediate. Today the Bank has much less of an instant grip on consumption.
Having the Bank themselves set rates, in sober monthly meetings, rather than the Chancellor, also helps things. One of Gordon Brown’s few good decisions, alongside not getting involved in the ERM again!
True but it does really raise the question of how the current set up would cope with a currency crisis like that. I am not sure that the current system has been tested in that respect. Obviously the bank crisis in 2008 did test the lender of last resort side and Darling was heavily involved in that for obvious reasons.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
I remember the day I drove to WIck for a case. When I left Dundee my mortgage was 12% but by the time it arrived it was 15%. There wasn't so much talk radio in those days but I listened to the news bulletins every hour with increasing disbelief. Black Wednesday it was called. Thankfully, the interest rate came down again the next day but only to 14% as I recall. That was genuinely scary and something I remember vividly when people talk about being worried by a 0.25% increase.
TBF it does take a long time to drive to Wick and back. Even so ...
Not quite sure why you tar all postwar housing with the same brush. Surely it depends to a great extent on who built it and what specs they had in mind? Here in Cannock they seem to have built for quality. I can tell you that by contrast in Coleford or Newent they didn’t.
Mmm -- the ex-council housing I rented in Cambridge before I moved here was pretty good. In particular it had two good sized bedrooms and a fair sized bathroom. A for-profit developer would have squeezed one good, one medium and one barely-big-enough-for-a-bed room into that space, and produced a worse house as a result...
Good morning all. Don't think I'll manage the Gathering; can I mention my earlier request for a Zoom (or similar) link up?
On Council housing, before the War the chap who would thirty or so years later become my father-in-law went to work, at 16, for the council in a Lancashire mill-town. On his first day, in the Housing Department he was advised to put his name down for a house, asked why and was told that, while he didn't need one now, and had no 'points', by the time he'd got to the top of the list, he would. Six or so years later, on marriage, he and his wife were able to move into a nice three-bedded Council house on a pleasant estate, where they stayed until almost retirement. I didn't think the house they then bought, on a private development was any 'better' structurally, than the one they left.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
I wouldn’t have bothered feeding the troll to be honest. Is there any point replying to someone offensively swearing at 9 in the morning?
I'm seeing increasing signs of the war drums being rolled out in the grocery industry. Sales are contracting, prices are rising and consumers are the most pessimistic about food prices since 2013. More worrying is that the commodity prices being quoted going forward in some cases are catastrophic.
There has been enough food price inflation for people to notice, and thats despite a lot of it being absorbed by manufacturers and retailers. The next wave of inflationary pressures look more severe and there is no absorption left - prices will have to be passed on and that means people having to make some stark choices as prices go up as the money they can spend goes down.
I think the sunny optimist / amoral remaining Boris boosters don't understand just how bad April is going to be. Forget your sad attempts at boosterism, people are going to get absolutely slammed by the price of everything shooting up just as taxes go up and inflation makes them poorer.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
Yes; and I was running a small, and unsuccessful, business which had a bank loan.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
Whilst I have no problem with controlled immigration, an awful lot of people told a lot of foreigners - and even suspected foreigners - to fuck off. Openly. In the streets.
When you say "nobody" I assume you mean mainstream politicians? What was May's "forriners go home" van all about then - and we know how rightly offended you were by that.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Why not simply spend some time and effort training our existing staff and giving them a reason to stay on? Surgical training programmes are over subscribed and under delivered, not least because the juniors have been working respiratory medicine not setting bones these last 2 years.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
Black Wednesday was caused by a tacit government policy of manipulating the exchange rate ("shadowing the D-mark"). An example of the costs of blind europhilia.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
That will be the same day. And almost no one was on fixed rates in those days either so the impact was much more immediate. Today the Bank has much less of an instant grip on consumption.
IIRC that was the first time Cameron burst onto the national political scene
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Why not simply spend some time and effort training our existing staff and giving them a reason to stay on? Surgical training programmes are over subscribed and under delivered, not least because the juniors have been working respiratory medicine not setting bones these last 2 years.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
Be fair. Just because you live in the UK and work in the NHS doesn't mean the views of someone who does neither are less valid than yours. I'm sure the NHS is crawling with diversity and equality managers, all likely on £150k a year. Its just that you don't see them from your remote vantage point.
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
That will be the same day. And almost no one was on fixed rates in those days either so the impact was much more immediate. Today the Bank has much less of an instant grip on consumption.
Having the Bank themselves set rates, in sober monthly meetings, rather than the Chancellor, also helps things. One of Gordon Brown’s few good decisions, alongside not getting involved in the ERM again!
True but it does really raise the question of how the current set up would cope with a currency crisis like that. I am not sure that the current system has been tested in that respect. Obviously the bank crisis in 2008 did test the lender of last resort side and Darling was heavily involved in that for obvious reasons.
It was only a currency crisis because politicians wanted a high exchange rate as a sign of their virility or something
On the eve of UK Foreign Sec Liz Truss's meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Russia says Britain used Skripal poisoning "tragedy for their own provocative purposes," blaming it for the low water mark in London-Moscow relation
Hilarious 'they actually responded to it?' comment.
Granted I'm no diplomat, but I feel like your on shaky ground when you're reduced to complaining about others being 'provocative' by their reaction to something.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Why not simply spend some time and effort training our existing staff and giving them a reason to stay on? Surgical training programmes are over subscribed and under delivered, not least because the juniors have been working respiratory medicine not setting bones these last 2 years.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
Besides, I imagine that most healthcare systems have similar pressures right now. Why should doctors, nurses etc come here rather then elsewhere?
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
Whilst I have no problem with controlled immigration, an awful lot of people told a lot of foreigners - and even suspected foreigners - to fuck off. Openly. In the streets.
When you say "nobody" I assume you mean mainstream politicians? What was May's "forriners go home" van all about then - and we know how rightly offended you were by that.
Yes, May was disgusting that's a good point. She's rightly gone and just a backbencher now. Those vans were in 2013 too, so pre-Brexit. I was assuming Stuart was making a not-so-coded reference to Brexit in his asinine comment.
Yes by nobody I'm excluding extremist idiots on the streets who existed pre-and post-Brexit. There will always be some who think like the likes of the BNP unfortunately though thankfully with our voting system we don't give an unjustified amplification to their voices as you see under PR voting systems.
Now we've no longer got the European Parliament to elect lunatics to, those cranks and loons are going to struggle even more to get any form of recognition.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Why not simply spend some time and effort training our existing staff and giving them a reason to stay on? Surgical training programmes are over subscribed and under delivered, not least because the juniors have been working respiratory medicine not setting bones these last 2 years.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
'Underserved' I think you meain in the last line ... but of course certain folk* have a habit of complaining about those communities and their lack of vaccine uptake, yet when one tries to do something about it ...
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Why not simply spend some time and effort training our existing staff and giving them a reason to stay on? Surgical training programmes are over subscribed and under delivered, not least because the juniors have been working respiratory medicine not setting bones these last 2 years.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
Sounds reasonable, agree that training is going to be a massive problem as everything has been diverted to the pandemic.
Also agree that recognition of qualifications is an issue that needs to be looked at - but on a worldwide basis, rather than concentrating specifically on EEA.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Why not simply spend some time and effort training our existing staff and giving them a reason to stay on? Surgical training programmes are over subscribed and under delivered, not least because the juniors have been working respiratory medicine not setting bones these last 2 years.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
Besides, I imagine that most healthcare systems have similar pressures right now. Why should doctors, nurses etc come here rather then elsewhere?
They won't but as with European Lorry drivers it will allow the Government to say they are doing something so passing the blame elsewhere.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
Great idea!!
It is fortunate that Asian and African nations have no requirement to retain the medical staff they have trained at great expense.
A bit of a flyer I know, but why don't we train enough of our own staff domestically and make terms and conditions attractive enough so they are not minded to bugger off to Australia and New Zealand as soon as they can?
Affordability is very much a reason why they have give up so much
It's almost like falling long term rates push up the nominal value of assets.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
I think that the effect will be relatively moderate so long as we continue to have 0.25% rises. Interest rate volatility was much greater in the past. And it may be again in the future of course. But an increase to 1 or 1.5% is unlikely to deflate the bubble on its own.
Just as a matter of interest, what's the highest interest rate you remember?
15%… for at least 5 hours
That will be the same day. And almost no one was on fixed rates in those days either so the impact was much more immediate. Today the Bank has much less of an instant grip on consumption.
Having the Bank themselves set rates, in sober monthly meetings, rather than the Chancellor, also helps things. One of Gordon Brown’s few good decisions, alongside not getting involved in the ERM again!
True but it does really raise the question of how the current set up would cope with a currency crisis like that. I am not sure that the current system has been tested in that respect. Obviously the bank crisis in 2008 did test the lender of last resort side and Darling was heavily involved in that for obvious reasons.
It was only a currency crisis because politicians wanted a high exchange rate as a sign of their virility or something
There was always going to be crisis because you cannot easily tether two economies (Britain / West Germany) when they are moving in different directions / different speeds. The only question was when it would occur.,
As for the rate we joined the ERM at, that was just the market rate when Major wished to destroy the news from the Labour Party conference by creating a far bigger story.
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
Whilst I have no problem with controlled immigration, an awful lot of people told a lot of foreigners - and even suspected foreigners - to fuck off. Openly. In the streets.
When you say "nobody" I assume you mean mainstream politicians? What was May's "forriners go home" van all about then - and we know how rightly offended you were by that.
Yes, May was disgusting that's a good point. She's rightly gone and just a backbencher now. Those vans were in 2013 too, so pre-Brexit. I was assuming Stuart was making a not-so-coded reference to Brexit in his asinine comment.
Yes by nobody I'm excluding extremist idiots on the streets who existed pre-and post-Brexit. There will always be some who think like the likes of the BNP unfortunately though thankfully with our voting system we don't give an unjustified amplification to their voices as you see under PR voting systems.
Now we've no longer got the European Parliament to elect lunatics to, those cranks and loons are going to struggle even more to get any form of recognition.
There are plenty of WWC mainstream voters who wanted all the foreign workers to go home. Who told journalists and politicians that repeatedly in both the referendum campaign and whilst awaiting the deliverance of Brexit. Why do you think the Nigel did his Breaking Ploint poster to whip up their views even more?
I’ve been convinced since mid December that the RU invasion of UKR is very likely. But I recognize that a lot of people disagree (not least of all, many in UKR government — at least publicly)
It is always good to reevaluate your assumptions so let’s red team the alternatives 🧵
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
I know you didn't, you are rational, but lots did. My dad did. That was his specific reason for voting leave. He told me. He is a racist and he is far from alone. I canvassed and found a lot of it. It didn't matter that I pointed out that it was also nonsense as leave only impacted immigrants from Europe so it wasn't going to have any impact on Black or Asian immigration anyway, which seemed to be the greater issue (A Nigerian was worse than a Pole to these people)
I'm seeing increasing signs of the war drums being rolled out in the grocery industry. Sales are contracting, prices are rising and consumers are the most pessimistic about food prices since 2013. More worrying is that the commodity prices being quoted going forward in some cases are catastrophic.
There has been enough food price inflation for people to notice, and thats despite a lot of it being absorbed by manufacturers and retailers. The next wave of inflationary pressures look more severe and there is no absorption left - prices will have to be passed on and that means people having to make some stark choices as prices go up as the money they can spend goes down.
I think the sunny optimist / amoral remaining Boris boosters don't understand just how bad April is going to be. Forget your sad attempts at boosterism, people are going to get absolutely slammed by the price of everything shooting up just as taxes go up and inflation makes them poorer.
I suspect that will kill Sunak's chances of ever being PM. His only hope lies in prising Johnson out of Number 10 and then using the change of management as an excuse for ameliorating the cost of living increases by reversing some of the tax decisions.
Why did these people say peadophile protector to Gove when they surrounded him in October?
Perhaps ask them rather than us.
I doubt you will get a sane answer though, just the sub-QAnon stuff that is taking hold of the British Right.
It’s actually a work of Satanic genius to have lighted upon paedophilia as the g spot of the disaffected and radicalised. Even reasonable people might feel uncomfortable if accused of being insufficiently disapproving of paedophiles by not going along with these people’s conspiracy theories. C4 News had an interesting interview the other night with the folk that mobbed Starmer including Corbyn P. One youngish bloke virtually admitted it was a strategy rather than a belief - we don’t necessarily think these people are paedos but it’s a metaphor for the power that they pursue and hold (I paraphrase). Expect a lot more of this crap.
I'm seeing increasing signs of the war drums being rolled out in the grocery industry. Sales are contracting, prices are rising and consumers are the most pessimistic about food prices since 2013. More worrying is that the commodity prices being quoted going forward in some cases are catastrophic.
There has been enough food price inflation for people to notice, and thats despite a lot of it being absorbed by manufacturers and retailers. The next wave of inflationary pressures look more severe and there is no absorption left - prices will have to be passed on and that means people having to make some stark choices as prices go up as the money they can spend goes down.
I think the sunny optimist / amoral remaining Boris boosters don't understand just how bad April is going to be. Forget your sad attempts at boosterism, people are going to get absolutely slammed by the price of everything shooting up just as taxes go up and inflation makes them poorer.
I suspect that will kill Sunak's chances of ever being PM. His only hope lies in prising Johnson out of Number 10 and then using the change of management as an excuse for ameliorating the cost of living increases by reversing some of the tax decisions.
Sunak screwed up by not forcing a VONC last week - now by the time the election comes round the pain will be obvious (higher fuel costs, higher food costs) and then made worse as the April pay pocket arrives with less rather than more money in it.
I’ve been convinced since mid December that the RU invasion of UKR is very likely. But I recognize that a lot of people disagree (not least of all, many in UKR government — at least publicly)
It is always good to reevaluate your assumptions so let’s red team the alternatives 🧵
Partygate is now so bloody boring. Is anyone - literally anyone (apart from @Scott_xP) excited by that latest photo?
The damage is done. Boris needs to go. But hurry up this is arse-achingly dull, now
Exactly my sentiments
It needs one final, breathtaking revelation, like the last few explosions of a big fireworks display. Cocaine snorting off a downing street official's back, say, or a naked conga.
Then on to more pressing matters like inflation and falling real wages.
What makes anyone think that Boris Johnson can deal effectively with inflation, falling real wages and all the other economic fundamentals about to hit the fan?
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
Johnson, of course, is interested in only one topic: Johnson.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
They need to get everyone they possibly can out of the NHS - I would suggest a reversal of of the income tax BIK charge for private healthcare provided by employers might be a good start, and let the employer offset it against corporation tax too.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
That’s Tories for you: telling foreigners to fuck off, then begging them to help you out of the hole you dug. You really are not just despicable, but very, very thick too.
Don't be stupid. Nobody ever told foreigners to fuck off.
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
I have to disagree there. A lot of people I know/knew were quite happy to blame the foreigners for all our countries woes, and were quite keen to send them back to where they came from. Even though a fair number of these foreignors would be "wiping their arses in the NHS". Politicians at the tme were not scared of lighting the blue touch paper (Turkey in the EU, etc), then retiring gracefully. You do have to be careful what you say, because you always pick up fellow travellors you weren't expecting.
Comments
Still a bit too far south for my tastes by about 200 miles. Perhaps a distillery tour followed by a haggis pie.
Because one of the ironest laws of politics is that when a party doesn't even try for the centre ground, it loses.
But yes- it normally takes 5-10 years for a party to acknowledge that. Shame, really.
Manchester Kurt, who pops up from time to time...
There's nothing inevitable in politics. When the narodists and socialists "went to the people" in the 1870s they found a conservative peasantry who were as likely to have these weirdo arrested then anything else. 30 years later and Russia was in revolt against the tsar and in another decade or so was a fully communist state.
The Russians loved their Romanov dynasty that had been around since the early 1600s, until they suddenly didn't.
Once Boris goes the party will become a bit more Thatcherite economically under Sunak or Truss but if they lose expect the party to move even further to the populist right than under Boris in opposition as well.
Boris has lost some Remainers and social liberals but many of them are fiscally dry, not necessarily moderates at all. It is when the Tories lose a general election the party may really move away from moderates for a period in opposition
The Decembrists nearly removed the monarchy and would have prevented the authoritarian and oppressive century in Russia under the last Tzar’s.
I like the way you cunningly moved the debate from UK to Russia politics 😆
However, I do give a nod to your Conservative peasantry, because in the late 1910ses and early 20s, it wasn’t as simple as Red v White there were the greens - not environmentalists, but those who lived out in the sticks warring against whites and reds.
“ The Green armies were semi-organized local militias that opposed the Bolsheviks, Whites, and foreign interventionists, and fought to protect their communities from requisitions or reprisals carried out by third parties.”
I don't go to most work functions either! I'm not the social butterfly really.
https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1491430374916132865?s=20&t=YlCH8mUgWfwV089xtOv-Dg
https://twitter.com/RobynDixon__/status/1491505434640977921?s=20&t=YlCH8mUgWfwV089xtOv-Dg
In Waverley, where I'm since last month the portfolio holder for social and "affordable" housing, we have the same issue but differently shaped. We are reviewing the strategy, and I'm thinking of doing what you warn against - requiring a fairly high proportion of housing (25%?) in new developments at around 60% of market rates. Most of the area is one of the wealthiest in Britain, but there are deprived pockets and there's a need for cheaper housing for the next generation and key workers - people simply can't afford to work in junior positions in a shop/school/hospital or study to the local college, so they commute from far away, which is just bad all round. So we think that developers will be up for it, since the profit they make on the rest of the development will be impressive (the usual issues of sequencing will be important). We've almost never experienced an area of building land that builders weren't fighting to develop, because a large part of the borough is AONB or at least green belt.
Do message me if you've further thoughts. I'd like to get it right, in a non-partisan way.
https://geary.substack.com
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10495543/BBC-axes-6m-local-hero-online-currency-scam.html
BBC axes show about £6m local hero over online currency 'scam' after some investors complained that it had been taken in and fallen victim to 'fraud'
It is understood it had filmed the documentary, We Are England: Birmingham’s Self-Made Crypto-Millionaire, in September and edited it before the currency collapsed.
A source at the corporation said the BBC was ‘investigating’ and ‘taking it very seriously’. Another senior BBC insider described the incident as ‘exasperating’.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0257/3165/products/dfpy50965_800x.jpeg
Even if he didn’t have an appalling track record on a wide range of issues, he has never shown any aptitude nor interest in the topic of economics. In fact he appears to neither know about nor care about the field. Beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse.
That contrasts with many PMs, who often appeared to be very interested in economics. Thatcher for example was always banging on about it. She clearly loved the topic: it stimulated her mind. Whatever stimulates Boris Johnson, or whatever passes for his “mind”, it is certainly not inflation or falling real wages.
I don’t think that we are going to be witnessing the downfall of Boris Johnson anytime soon (barring the Clowning Street cocaine snorting scenario you paint), so we are all about to find out just how big an economics genius Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is.
You say that Boris Johnson opposes austerity. Fine. But I’d like to know what he is *for*, not what he is *against*.
Against:
Business
Austerity
International trade
SMEs
For:
Higher tax burden
Barriers to trade
White elephant infrastructure projects
Promoting Paultons Park Home of Peppa Pig World to a CBI meeting
Forgive me if I’m unimpressed.
Meet Mr Inflation and Mrs Falling Real Wages. You are about to become very, very well acquainted.
Interesting discussion. I just wanted to recommend the book 'Municipal Dreams; the rise and fall of social housing' by John Boughton. It is a very interesting history of how Council housing has evolved over the years.
On the other hand, if it were being held in Downing St…
It’s very nice. Three bedrooms, large kitchen, enormous living room, garage joined to the main house (admittedly I added the passage, the conservatory and the annexe I use as an office).
It’s also very solidly built and therefore, bizarrely, more energy efficient than its newer counterparts in the same street.
Not quite sure why you tar all postwar housing with the same brush. Surely it depends to a great extent on who built it and what specs they had in mind? Here in Cannock they seem to have built for quality. I can tell you that by contrast in Coleford or Newent they didn’t.
The core vote needs more and more pension spending and more and more healthcare, and they don't want to pay for it. It'll be left to Sunak to deal with that problem, and we can already see from the Old Gits' Arse-Wiping Tax Health and Social Care Levy how he intends to go about that: put up taxes on earned incomes until half the entire population is dependent on food banks.
So long as the rich elderly and their heirs are sufficiently bribed, nothing else matters. The only flaw in that particular plan is the impending collapse of the NHS - driven largely by the fact that the Government visits poor conditions and, in most cases, low wages upon a pissed off and depleted workforce, who will be sorely tempted to jack it in and go to work for private hospitals, hospitals abroad, or get a stress-free shift at Aldi.
Private healthcare is in finite supply and is very expensive: the opportunities for queue jumping are limited. If a sufficient number of olds with dodgy joints find themselves joining the back of a five-year waiting list for operations, then the Government might finally be under serious threat.
Our family watched the Tinder Swindler last night on Netflix. A simply superb documentary, very well put together, about someone who ran a Ponzi scheme online by which he extravegantly impressed one woman after another using the money of his previous relationships to fund the current. He committed large scale fraud amounting to at least $10m in 7 or 8 countries, some of whom put out warrants for him but none of whom seemed to treat it particularly seriously.
I highly recommend it.
Then go on a hiring spree. Send a recruitment team out worldwide to find healthcare staff, and fast-track visas for them and their families. There will be many already in the NHS that are totally broken by the past two years, and desparately need some R&R downtime.
Oh, and a scrapping of any and all posts with words like “diversity” or “equality” in the job title.
I wonder what happens if rates need to rise?
No offence to you or your dad but it's Remain extremist nonsense to claim that "moderates" were purged in Autumn 19. Or that anything different happened in Autumn 19 to the past.
There's been an attempt by the extremist Remainers to rebrand themselves as "moderate" but there's nothing moderate about the likes of Dominic Grieve being elected promising to respect the referendum result then working night and day to overturn it and rejecting every single leave option.
Furthermore there's nothing new either. What Boris did in Autumn 19 was make not extending Article 50 a "confidence" issue and anyone who votes against the government on a confidence issue is automatically expelled. That's not without precedence, it's the same trick that John Major (with Ken Clarke in the Cabinet) pulled with the Maastricht Treaty to force the Maastricht rebels to vote for it. And no the passing of the ridiculous fixed term Parliament Act doesn't change the precedence or principle.
The only difference between Autumn 19 and Maastricht is that all but one of John Major's "bastards" backed down when he called Maastricht a confidence issue, the one who didn't vote for it was expelled from the Party despite being out of the country. The Autumn 19 so-called misnamed "moderates" went further than the "bastards" did even voting against once it was a confidence motion.
They knew the consequences. It was their choice to vote against. Nothing new except that the die hard Remainers moderated their behaviour even less than the Bastards.
As I said above, beyond “Fuck business”, I cannot recall a single significant contribution by Johnson to economic discourse. I’d like to know what he is *for*, not what he is *against*.
Against:
Business
Austerity
International trade
SMEs
For:
Higher tax burden
Barriers to trade
White elephant infrastructure projects
Promoting Paultons Park Home of Peppa Pig World to a CBI meeting
It’s not just the English nationalist, populist, cult* Government that might finally be under serious threat, it is the entire economy.
*
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/amp/entry/lord-patten-boris-johnson_uk_61fd2e32e4b09170e9cfd074/
That and the realities of a 1980s council doing incompetence on a grand scale...
https://twitter.com/accountablegop/status/1491525010997096449?s=21
Pelosi’s stormtroopers kicking in doors to ensure soup is not being eaten hot.
Starmer’s interview in today’s Times:
Does he think that the mob that attacked him was fuelled by Johnson’s accusation?
“I have never been called a paedophile protector before,” he said.
“That happened yesterday for the first time in my life.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/c4f600a2-89f2-11ec-8600-c48a9935f856?shareToken=135c1d700fe68d9ceb49b2d84c85c44a
Controlled immigration is entirely compatible with saying that people with skills we need please come here, even if people without skills we need may find it harder to get a visa.
On Council housing, before the War the chap who would thirty or so years later become my father-in-law went to work, at 16, for the council in a Lancashire mill-town. On his first day, in the Housing Department he was advised to put his name down for a house, asked why and was told that, while he didn't need one now, and had no 'points', by the time he'd got to the top of the list, he would.
Six or so years later, on marriage, he and his wife were able to move into a nice three-bedded Council house on a pleasant estate, where they stayed until almost retirement.
I didn't think the house they then bought, on a private development was any 'better' structurally, than the one they left.
There has been enough food price inflation for people to notice, and thats despite a lot of it being absorbed by manufacturers and retailers. The next wave of inflationary pressures look more severe and there is no absorption left - prices will have to be passed on and that means people having to make some stark choices as prices go up as the money they can spend goes down.
I think the sunny optimist / amoral remaining Boris boosters don't understand just how bad April is going to be. Forget your sad attempts at boosterism, people are going to get absolutely slammed by the price of everything shooting up just as taxes go up and inflation makes them poorer.
In a letter to constituents, he says Tory MPs are “incandescent” and warns Boris Johnson that “seeking to weather a storm cannot be enough”.
“This issue is not over.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/solicitor-general-alex-chalk-tells-of-dismay-at-downing-street-parties-37898bjx2
When you say "nobody" I assume you mean mainstream politicians? What was May's "forriners go home" van all about then - and we know how rightly offended you were by that.
Since we have elevated the barriers to recognition of overseas qualifications, overseas recruitment has become more difficult since Brexit. EEA qualifications are no longer recognised, and that was a big pool of staff. There are also significant worldwide shortages of staff, as this us an issue everywhere with aging populations, and covid recovery.
Incidentally the only "diversity officers" I ever meet are those working on health promotion and similar campaigns in undeserved communities. Vaccination and the like.
I doubt you will get a sane answer though, just the sub-QAnon stuff that is taking hold of the British Right.
Granted I'm no diplomat, but I feel like your on shaky ground when you're reduced to complaining about others being 'provocative' by their reaction to something.
What does that make Boris? It seems to put him in the same category doesn't it if he raises the same nonsense.
Yes by nobody I'm excluding extremist idiots on the streets who existed pre-and post-Brexit. There will always be some who think like the likes of the BNP unfortunately though thankfully with our voting system we don't give an unjustified amplification to their voices as you see under PR voting systems.
Now we've no longer got the European Parliament to elect lunatics to, those cranks and loons are going to struggle even more to get any form of recognition.
Dr. Foxy, wasn't it far left types who accosted Starmer? [Not paying much attention so apologies if mistaken, but that's what I'd heard].
*Not a reference to the previous poster.
Also agree that recognition of qualifications is an issue that needs to be looked at - but on a worldwide basis, rather than concentrating specifically on EEA.
https://twitter.com/Hermit_Thrush/status/1491389547225423875/
It is fortunate that Asian and African nations have no requirement to retain the medical staff they have trained at great expense.
A bit of a flyer I know, but why don't we train enough of our own staff domestically and make terms and conditions attractive enough so they are not minded to bugger off to Australia and New Zealand as soon as they can?
As for the rate we joined the ERM at, that was just the market rate when Major wished to destroy the news from the Labour Party conference by creating a far bigger story.
It is always good to reevaluate your assumptions so let’s red team the alternatives 🧵
https://twitter.com/dalperovitch/status/1491636736291655682?s=21
It you want to persuade people you care about our proud cities, it helps to start with the basics. https://twitter.com/chrisburn_post/status/1491491277648670729