Disappointing to see the Middlesex - Surrey game not sold out
Almost no game in the Blast has been sold out. Glamorgan v Gloucestershire was barely half full. There were plenty of seats in Bristol tonight .
Not sure whether that's due to everything else going on, reining in discretionary spending, lack of interest, or the miserable weather.
Will be interesting to see if the Hundred has reasonable sales. Unless they're a big improvement on last year, cricket's finances for 2023 will look distinctly precarious.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
When yours truly was a lad waaaaay back in the 1960s, when my mom wanted us to call family members in other states, we'd all go out to my dad's office at the plant where he worked. Because the company had what was called a WATS line, which was a flat-rate for unlimited long-distance calls, which were quite expensive. With company employees allowed to make occasional personal calls.
At same period and somewhat later knew folks who were on party lines, with each separate phone having a distinct ring. Plus obligatory little old lady who listened into to all calls, as part of the service.
Disappointing to see the Middlesex - Surrey game not sold out
Almost no game in the Blast has been sold out. Glamorgan v Gloucestershire was barely half full. There were plenty of seats in Bristol tonight .
Not sure whether that's due to everything else going on, reining in discretionary spending, lack of interest, or the miserable weather.
Will be interesting to see if the Hundred has reasonable sales. Unless they're a big improvement on last year, cricket's finances for 2023 will look distinctly precarious.
I can’t help but raise a smile though, to hear of almost sold out Test matches and half full limited-overs games. Better that, than the alternate.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Except, judging by the signage, that’s almost certainly a British airport. Heathrow or Gatwick?
I remember in the 60’s on a Saturday night people would queue outside the phone box to phone home to Scotland from Winchester. There was a strict etiquette. You did not hog the phone. You were respectful of others in the queue. You took your turn and no more. We have gained much but lost something too.
It was the same at university in 1996, on the cusp of the mobile revolution. By 1999, I had a mobile phone, but would still call my parents with the phone box number to call me back.
A couple of years later, this concept would have been totally alien to everyone.
Yes; in 1995 or 96 I was at university when my grandfather died; my parents had to phone the college to get them to leave me a written note to call home on the payphone so they could let me know...
The looming civil war over economics (Thatch/free markets vs Big State/France-style projects) when the Tories lose power is going to be totally popcorn:
Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot · 44m Mini exc - I’ve seen a new memo circulated by some key Tories before the VONC - Johnson’s speech was v interesting in how it spoke to some of its criticisms of his govt - pledging cutting taxes, cutting spending, cutting regulation.
The memo went round dozens of MPs previewing the launch of Steve Baker’s Conservative Way Forward (the revival of the Thatcherite group). A formal launch seems imminent. First page here, thought it’s longer
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
The passport queues will be what does for the 'going on holiday' to wherever it is that has passport queues.
Disappointing to see the Middlesex - Surrey game not sold out
Almost no game in the Blast has been sold out. Glamorgan v Gloucestershire was barely half full. There were plenty of seats in Bristol tonight .
Not sure whether that's due to everything else going on, reining in discretionary spending, lack of interest, or the miserable weather.
Will be interesting to see if the Hundred has reasonable sales. Unless they're a big improvement on last year, cricket's finances for 2023 will look distinctly precarious.
I can’t help but raise a smile though, to hear of almost sold out Test matches and half full limited-overs games. Better that, than the alternate.
Better that both should be sold out and the money should be coming in. There are half a dozen clubs including Yorkshire and Middlesex that are already under severe financial pressure.
(And the Lord's Test was anything but sold out, although that was due to the epochal stupidity of the ECB.)
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
The nation of collaborators have been taking advice from South Yorkshire Police.
CCTV footage from the night of the Champions League final has been deleted, an official from the French Football Federation (FFF) confirmed on Thursday.
The CCTV footage may have justified — or undermined — claims by the French authorities that ticketless Liverpool supporters were to blame for chaotic scenes around the Stade de France before the final, which Real Madrid won 1-0.
France’s sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera and Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin have both sought to blame Liverpool fans.
Liverpool supporters, including families with children, were tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed outside the stadium by police ahead of the final on May 28.
Multiple eyewitnesses claim that after the match local gangs then assaulted and robbed fans from both teams making their way back to coaches and trains.
The French Senate is now investigating the incident.
But there is no video evidence to corroborate this as it has already been destroyed due to an apparent failure by officials to request copies.
Erwan Le Prevost, director of international relations at the FFF told the French Senate that CCTV footage of the stadium is automatically deleted after seven days.
As the footage had not been requested before the seven days were up, it was deleted.
He said: “The images are available for seven days. They are then automatically destroyed.
“We should have had a requisition to provide them to the different populations (organisations). The images are extremely violent.”
I remember in the 60’s on a Saturday night people would queue outside the phone box to phone home to Scotland from Winchester. There was a strict etiquette. You did not hog the phone. You were respectful of others in the queue. You took your turn and no more. We have gained much but lost something too.
It was the same at university in 1996, on the cusp of the mobile revolution. By 1999, I had a mobile phone, but would still call my parents with the phone box number to call me back.
A couple of years later, this concept would have been totally alien to everyone.
Yes; in 1995 or 96 I was at university when my grandfather died; my parents had to phone the college to get them to leave me a written note to call home on the payphone so they could let me know...
For a few years a little later than that, not every fresher would have a phone, but every fresher would have an email (at least a college email). (And that being said, people wouldn't have checked it after work hours.)
@JuliaDavisNews Russian state TV announces that the President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega invited Russian Armed Forces to enter his country in the second half of 2022. State TV host Olga Skabeeva said: "It's time for Russia to roll out something powerful closer to the American city upon a hill."
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I have no idea to be honest, as I haven't been away for a while.
Andrew Marr reporting in Newstatesman that senior anti-Johnson tories were very pissed off that the threshold was reached before the by-election disaster. "too soon".
I am wondering whether Johnson had his team send a few letters to get it brought forward?
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
You can't be serious! Maybe in Paookaville but not if you were living anywhere interesting. Everyone was much freer in the 70's. One of those rare times where poverty was more attractive than vulgar wealth and people gave a damn.
Yes, and the 'talent' were much freer to abuse women.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
@JuliaDavisNews Russian state TV announces that the President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega invited Russian Armed Forces to enter his country in the second half of 2022. State TV host Olga Skabeeva said: "It's time for Russia to roll out something powerful closer to the American city upon a hill."
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
Also, there's simply a lot of luck in whether you have a high income - your country of birth, your upbringing, your neighbourhood, your teachers, whether the place where you work flourishes or collapses. It's reasonable to tax high income and wealth up to a point simply to even out the outcomes to some extent (which isn't even controversial for income - virtually nobody is against higher rate tax for high incomes), and in the same way it reasonable to pass on some wealth in overseas aid to people in countries where nearly everyone is "unlucky" merely to have been born there.
The looming civil war over economics (Thatch/free markets vs Big State/France-style projects) when the Tories lose power is going to be totally popcorn:
Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot · 44m Mini exc - I’ve seen a new memo circulated by some key Tories before the VONC - Johnson’s speech was v interesting in how it spoke to some of its criticisms of his govt - pledging cutting taxes, cutting spending, cutting regulation.
The memo went round dozens of MPs previewing the launch of Steve Baker’s Conservative Way Forward (the revival of the Thatcherite group). A formal launch seems imminent. First page here, thought it’s longer
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
Egates won't solve it - non Schengen passports will still need to be physically stamped under the new system that is (finally) coming in later this year.
Its daft, but its not specific to us (its any non-Schengen country). And besides which I assume that we support sovereign areas setting their own border policies to suit their own interests...
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
Cut VAT on fuel to 0%, cut fuel duty for a year. Labour should back it.
Ed Davey has already suggested a temporary VAT cut, FWIW.
We were told that one of the benefits of leaving the EU would be we could scrap VAT on domestic fuel. It strikes me now would be the perfect time to put that into practice.
VAT was always originally supposed to be about discretionary spend anyway. Hence the reason things like food were exempt. Major should never have introduced it on domestic fuel and we should now take the opportunity to get rid of it permanently.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
The worst passport queues I’ve been in recently were coming back to the UK. That’s not actually a Brexit thing of course, it’s largely because of piss-poor organisation, e-gates that don’t work half the time and the (nice for them but less for us) decision to open up e-gates to an ever widening proportion of the world.
The biggest issue of all those from anecdotal experience is the ridiculous performance of the e-gates. Last time all 3 of the people in front of me had to try about 5 times to get their passports read by the camera before having to abandon the gate and “seek assistance”. Worse than 5 years ago. Maybe there’s a new supplier at LHR.
I’ve managed to avoid the long non-EEA queue in European airports so far.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
The worst passport queues I’ve been in recently were coming back to the UK. That’s not actually a Brexit thing of course, it’s largely because of piss-poor organisation, e-gates that don’t work half the time and the (nice for them but less for us) decision to open up e-gates to an ever widening proportion of the world.
The biggest issue of all those from anecdotal experience is the ridiculous performance of the e-gates. Last time all 3 of the people in front of me had to try about 5 times to get their passports read by the camera before having to abandon the gate and “seek assistance”. Worse than 5 years ago. Maybe there’s a new supplier at LHR.
I’ve managed to avoid the long non-EEA queue in European airports so far.
I never get through the e-gates at Gatwick and that has been on two different passports, but I put that down to my picture as it seems to work for most other people. It is just irritating I go through the exercise whereas I might as well just go straight to the manned booth.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
Also, there's simply a lot of luck in whether you have a high income - your country of birth, your upbringing, your neighbourhood, your teachers, whether the place where you work flourishes or collapses. It's reasonable to tax high income and wealth up to a point simply to even out the outcomes to some extent (which isn't even controversial for income - virtually nobody is against higher rate tax for high incomes), and in the same way it reasonable to pass on some wealth in overseas aid to people in countries where nearly everyone is "unlucky" merely to have been born there.
The biggest problem is, of course, that progressive taxation of incomes is largely uncontroversial, whereas a similar attitude to assets (especially houses, of course) provokes outraged bleating. Indeed, it goes further than that: heavier and heavier taxes on incomes are deployed as a means to avoid taxing assets. The Health and Social Care Levy was created, in essence, so that the Government could raid the earned incomes of people of working age to pay the spiralling cost of elderly care, rather than asking the recipients of that care to contribute more from the ever-growing stockpile of wealth that most of them are sitting on.
Now that this particular Rubicon has been crossed, we can expect the new tax to just keep creeping continuously upwards over the coming years, in lockstep with the ageing of the population. The problem of an ever-growing proportion of the people being decrepit and in need of more complex and expensive care interventions is going to be paid for by loading all the burden onto the backs of the correspondingly shrinking cohort of able bodied workers.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Except, judging by the signage, that’s almost certainly a British airport. Heathrow or Gatwick?
I was coming through Gatwick earlier today. The e-gates weren't working so took an hour or so to get through immigration. Apart from that the one change from the pre covid travels I noticed were 1) staff manning customs and 2) actually pulling people over, which I don't remember seeing since I was a schoolboy.
Cut VAT on fuel to 0%, cut fuel duty for a year. Labour should back it.
Ed Davey has already suggested a temporary VAT cut, FWIW.
We were told that one of the benefits of leaving the EU would be we could scrap VAT on domestic fuel. It strikes me now would be the perfect time to put that into practice.
VAT was always originally supposed to be about discretionary spend anyway. Hence the reason things like food were exempt. Major should never have introduced it on domestic fuel and we should now take the opportunity to get rid of it permanently.
They’ll make a Lib Dem of you yet…
There are various posters on here who I think have very similar views to me, like Richard and TSE, who definitely don't seem to want to be LDs, yet I have been a member of the LDs and previous incarnations for over 40 years and a supporter all my life. I'm not sure why there is that difference.
Yes; in 1995 or 96 I was at university when my grandfather died; my parents had to phone the college to get them to leave me a written note to call home on the payphone so they could let me know...
For a few years a little later than that, not every fresher would have a phone, but every fresher would have an email (at least a college email). (And that being said, people wouldn't have checked it after work hours.)
As it happens I did have a university email address, but my parents did not. In that year I had to go to a college computer room to check it -- it wasn't until my second year that I had a room with an ethernet connection and could check email from my own PC.
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Lots of central and eastern Europe belongs to the extraordinary Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. It has had much worse (and less flamboyant) custodians. Bring it back.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
The worst passport queues I’ve been in recently were coming back to the UK. That’s not actually a Brexit thing of course, it’s largely because of piss-poor organisation, e-gates that don’t work half the time and the (nice for them but less for us) decision to open up e-gates to an ever widening proportion of the world.
The biggest issue of all those from anecdotal experience is the ridiculous performance of the e-gates. Last time all 3 of the people in front of me had to try about 5 times to get their passports read by the camera before having to abandon the gate and “seek assistance”. Worse than 5 years ago. Maybe there’s a new supplier at LHR.
I’ve managed to avoid the long non-EEA queue in European airports so far.
I never get through the e-gates at Gatwick and that has been on two different passports, but I put that down to my picture as it seems to work for most other people. It is just irritating I go through the exercise whereas I might as well just go straight to the manned booth.
Major issue if your picture works for most other people.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Sorry Leon you are not reading the post. You enter and leave country X, you then go to Portugal with their super-duper e-gate. Because you haven't been recorded leaving country X you now can't enter Portugal. It makes not a jot of difference Portugal are efficient you are not getting in.
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Quite right. Why do we bother providing indoor toilets in social housing? Bloody ingrates.
And baths, when the miners will just use them to keep coal in.
Andrew Marr reporting in Newstatesman that senior anti-Johnson tories were very pissed off that the threshold was reached before the by-election disaster. "too soon".
I am wondering whether Johnson had his team send a few letters to get it brought forward?
It's nonsense. There's no way they could know everyone who was thinking of sending a letter in anyway, the fact these voices are claiming to be surprised shows it is not coordinated enough.
I don't buy it - if they were so concerned about reaching the threshold too soon then many of them would have held off of post dated their letters. We know ones did that, Brady acknowledged it. So if those 'senior' figures are being truthful then all their own letters would have been post dated for after the by-elections.
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Andrew Marr reporting in Newstatesman that senior anti-Johnson tories were very pissed off that the threshold was reached before the by-election disaster. "too soon".
I am wondering whether Johnson had his team send a few letters to get it brought forward?
Talk about the blindingly obvious. Boris undoubtedly accelerated the vote to his own advantage. I have no doubt that he expected to win more easily though.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Quite right. Why do we bother providing indoor toilets in social housing? Bloody ingrates.
And baths, when the miners will just use them to keep coal in.
Right....
I used to get up half an hour before I went to bed....
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Indeed, just as the Netherlands are trying to take the freight traffic from France.
Portugal are showing the way with letting UK passports through the e-gates, and everywhere else with significant UK tourism or business travel will quickly follow. If Macron thinks it makes him more manly to let the Brits stand in line at the border, then they’ll go elsewhere to spend their cash in future.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
Ubiquitous amongst young men 1914-18 too.
I think my grandfather only left Britain once in his 86 years, but for 3 years. He went to France, then to Mesopotamia, then Egypt on his way home. After that he preferred Scarborough to foreign places, having seen what they got up to there.
While foreign travel was quite common historically, it was a lot slower, and often only one way.
Yes; in 1995 or 96 I was at university when my grandfather died; my parents had to phone the college to get them to leave me a written note to call home on the payphone so they could let me know...
For a few years a little later than that, not every fresher would have a phone, but every fresher would have an email (at least a college email). (And that being said, people wouldn't have checked it after work hours.)
As it happens I did have a university email address, but my parents did not. In that year I had to go to a college computer room to check it -- it wasn't until my second year that I had a room with an ethernet connection and could check email from my own PC.
Bah. That's nothing. As I didn't have a Windows/DOS PC, I had to alter some source code to be able to access the uni network ...
And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Indeed, just as the Netherlands are trying to take the freight traffic from France.
Portugal are showing the way with letting UK passports through the e-gates, and everywhere else with significant UK tourism or business travel will quickly follow. If Macron thinks it makes him more manly to let the Brits stand in line at the border, then they’ll go elsewhere to spend their cash in future.
Hi Sandpit. See my reply to Leon. This is not the issue.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Sorry Leon you are not reading the post. You enter and leave country X, you then go to Portugal with their super-duper e-gate. Because you haven't been recorded leaving country X you now can't enter Portugal. It makes not a jot of difference Portugal are efficient you are not getting in.
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
This is for arrivals from other Schengen countries? I assume this is a short/medium term problem while the various databases are integrated.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Quite right. Why do we bother providing indoor toilets in social housing? Bloody ingrates.
And baths, when the miners will just use them to keep coal in.
Right....
I used to get up half an hour before I went to bed....
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Poverty in absolute terms is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, you're right.
But social mobility? I'd be surprised if it's higher today than it was in 1972. There's an LSE blog about one definition of "social mobility" that shows it's fallen in a hole since the GFC.
I'm far from convinced that is true. Taking politics, look at the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. I'm not Rayner's greatest fan, but there's very little chance someone of her background would have been an MP, let alone hold the position she does now, in the 1970s.
Or even the much-maligned Deputy PM. Looking at the current cabinet, and at backgrounds, there's probably little chance Patel, Truss, Dorries, Sharma and others would have made a government cabinet in the 1970s; not just because of their (lack of) skills, but because their faces probably would not have fitted.
And I see it in the wider world. I know someone who, whilst at school in the late 1970s, was told that there was little point educating him as he would just end up working at the local mine. Which he did. If that happened nowadays it would be a minor scandal.
IMV we, as individuals, have far more opportunities than we did in the past.
Social mobility is not just about men or class ...
Anecdata and examples prove nothing.
You need to have something measurable and measure it. That's what the LSE blog I linked to elsewhere has done. If your measure of social mobility is "proportion of MPs who are female" then you have a case for we've never had ti so good. But personally, that's not the measure I'd use.
Yes; in 1995 or 96 I was at university when my grandfather died; my parents had to phone the college to get them to leave me a written note to call home on the payphone so they could let me know...
For a few years a little later than that, not every fresher would have a phone, but every fresher would have an email (at least a college email). (And that being said, people wouldn't have checked it after work hours.)
As it happens I did have a university email address, but my parents did not. In that year I had to go to a college computer room to check it -- it wasn't until my second year that I had a room with an ethernet connection and could check email from my own PC.
Bah. That's nothing. As I didn't have a Windows/DOS PC, I had to alter some source code to be able to access the uni network ...
And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you
I try not to hear about the things my son has done with education based internet systems. It only worries me!
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
Or perhaps karma.
Is there a difference between karma and kismet? Never been quite sure.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Lots of central and eastern Europe belongs to the extraordinary Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. It has had much worse (and less flamboyant) custodians. Bring it back.
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
Or perhaps karma.
Is there a difference between karma and kismet? Never been quite sure.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
Ubiquitous amongst young men 1914-18 too.
I think my grandfather only left Britain once in his 86 years, but for 3 years. He went to France, then to Mesopotamia, then Egypt on his way home. After that he preferred Scarborough to foreign places, having seen what they got up to there.
While foreign travel was quite common historically, it was a lot slower, and often only one way.
I think we tend to be a bit all or nothing about these comparisons. Clearly there was a lot less travel in the past. Many more people who lived their whole lives within relatively short distances of their birth. But it didn't mean no-one travelled. I've heard a bit about my wife's family history, and her grandma rarely left the parish, let alone the county or the country. But then there are stories of one woman a couple of generations further back, who crossed the Atlantic a fair few times.
There's always much more variability than people give credence to. You have similar sorts of effects with looking at historical data on life expectancy, or weather, or any number of things. Don't neglect variance.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Looking forward to Mongolia taking back the swathes of Russia that "always" belonged to them
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
Or perhaps karma.
Is there a difference between karma and kismet? Never been quite sure.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Looking forward to Mongolia taking back the swathes of Russia that "always" belonged to them
The coast around Vladivostok used to belong to China...
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Quite right. Why do we bother providing indoor toilets in social housing? Bloody ingrates.
And baths, when the miners will just use them to keep coal in.
A pal I was out drinking tonight told me he was once the guest of a senior prosecutor in LA. He slept in a metal bath, not because he considered himself a particular target but because he had read the statistics of those killed or wounded by stray shots, sometimes up to a mile away from their intended targets, such was the power of the guns.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
Ubiquitous amongst young men 1914-18 too.
I think my grandfather only left Britain once in his 86 years, but for 3 years. He went to France, then to Mesopotamia, then Egypt on his way home. After that he preferred Scarborough to foreign places, having seen what they got up to there.
While foreign travel was quite common historically, it was a lot slower, and often only one way.
I think we tend to be a bit all or nothing about these comparisons. Clearly there was a lot less travel in the past. Many more people who lived their whole lives within relatively short distances of their birth. But it didn't mean no-one travelled. I've heard a bit about my wife's family history, and her grandma rarely left the parish, let alone the county or the country. But then there are stories of one woman a couple of generations further back, who crossed the Atlantic a fair few times.
There's always much more variability than people give credence to. You have similar sorts of effects with looking at historical data on life expectancy, or weather, or any number of things. Don't neglect variance.
One interesting stat that I read was that in Shakespeares time around 20% of the English population lived in London for part of their lives. There was a surprising amount of movement around the country, as well as abroad.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
Which makes it all the more urgent for Sweden to be in. If Erdogan is in any way co-ordinating with Putin, which doesn't seem at all impossible, then we have a *real* problem.
Some of his rhetoric on Greece today and on Wednesday has also been *mighty* familiar.
"There are nine US bases right now. They were established in Greece. Against whom were they established? The answer they give is ‘against Russia.’ We don’t buy it, take no offense,” Bloomberg quoted Erdogan as saying late on Wednesday during a joint press conference with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.""
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
Ubiquitous amongst young men 1914-18 too.
I think my grandfather only left Britain once in his 86 years, but for 3 years. He went to France, then to Mesopotamia, then Egypt on his way home. After that he preferred Scarborough to foreign places, having seen what they got up to there.
While foreign travel was quite common historically, it was a lot slower, and often only one way.
I think we tend to be a bit all or nothing about these comparisons. Clearly there was a lot less travel in the past. Many more people who lived their whole lives within relatively short distances of their birth. But it didn't mean no-one travelled. I've heard a bit about my wife's family history, and her grandma rarely left the parish, let alone the county or the country. But then there are stories of one woman a couple of generations further back, who crossed the Atlantic a fair few times.
There's always much more variability than people give credence to. You have similar sorts of effects with looking at historical data on life expectancy, or weather, or any number of things. Don't neglect variance.
One interesting stat that I read was that in Shakespeares time around 20% of the English population lived in London for part of their lives. There was a surprising amount of movement around the country, as well as abroad.
I don't know when London's birth rate first exceeded its mortality rate, but it must have been in the later Victorian era. Its population grew slowly and steadily from the time of the Great Plague onwards solely due to inward migration.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Looking forward to Mongolia taking back the swathes of Russia that "always" belonged to them
Perhaps China are licking their lips about the part of Siberia they long laid claim to? Have any 'realists' in the west bothered pointing this out to Putin over the years?
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Sorry Leon you are not reading the post. You enter and leave country X, you then go to Portugal with their super-duper e-gate. Because you haven't been recorded leaving country X you now can't enter Portugal. It makes not a jot of difference Portugal are efficient you are not getting in.
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
This is for arrivals from other Schengen countries? I assume this is a short/medium term problem while the various databases are integrated.
Any UK passport holder needs to ensure they are recorded arriving and leaving the EU otherwise they will incorrectly be recorded still being in the EU. When they subsequently arrive in the EU (even though it is blindly obvious they must have previously left) they will be deported, possibly fined and possibly banned from ever re-entering if they are recorded as being present for more than 90 days in 180. It has been an issue with passport stamps, but hopefully won't be an issue now it is automated, but people are paranoid as you just don't know.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
And what do people think the effect on market expectations would have been if the government had taken such a step? Interest expectations would have gone through the roof. There are no free lunches.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
Also, there's simply a lot of luck in whether you have a high income - your country of birth, your upbringing, your neighbourhood, your teachers, whether the place where you work flourishes or collapses. It's reasonable to tax high income and wealth up to a point simply to even out the outcomes to some extent (which isn't even controversial for income - virtually nobody is against higher rate tax for high incomes), and in the same way it reasonable to pass on some wealth in overseas aid to people in countries where nearly everyone is "unlucky" merely to have been born there.
Also, to challenge @JosiasJessop's claim that relative wealth inequalities don't matter, there is a good body of economic research that claims relative wealth inequality is actually much more important above a certain level of income (i.e. once absolute poverty isn't an issue), both because the costs of things like houses go up disproportionately, and also because the inequalities fray the social fabric of society. So the current model clearly works for the very rich, might work for the poorest (as absolute poverty has reduced) but there is a significant group in between (I hesitate to use the term 'squeezed middle') who have suffered because e.g. they used to be able to afford to buy a house but now can't because the market is skewed by the rich.
CH 4 News pointing out that Liz Truss encouraged British citizens to go and fight there. What a foolish thing for a Foreign Secretary to do. Jenrick seems to be rowing back but they have footage of her saying it. These incompetents cant do anything right.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
[Pedant Mode On] Switzerland is not in the EEA. [Pedant Mode Off]
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
The President of Russia, a disgraced ex-KGB agent, millionaire despite a modest salary, serial killer, notorious election forger and infamous love rat was lying about something?
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
The President of Russia, a disgraced ex-KGB agent, millionaire despite a modest salary, serial killer, notorious election forger and infamous love rat was lying about something?
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Sorry Leon you are not reading the post. You enter and leave country X, you then go to Portugal with their super-duper e-gate. Because you haven't been recorded leaving country X you now can't enter Portugal. It makes not a jot of difference Portugal are efficient you are not getting in.
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
This is for arrivals from other Schengen countries? I assume this is a short/medium term problem while the various databases are integrated.
Any UK passport holder needs to ensure they are recorded arriving and leaving the EU otherwise they will incorrectly be recorded still being in the EU. When they subsequently arrive in the EU (even though it is blindly obvious they must have previously left) they will be deported, possibly fined and possibly banned from ever re-entering if they are recorded as being present for more than 90 days in 180. It has been an issue with passport stamps, but hopefully won't be an issue now it is automated, but people are paranoid as you just don't know.
So this is for arrivals from all countries. How is that going to work with the growing proliferation of e-gates?
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
The President of Russia, a disgraced ex-KGB agent, millionaire despite a modest salary, serial killer, notorious election forger and infamous love rat was lying about something?
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
Which makes it all the more urgent for Sweden to be in. If Erdogan is in any way co-ordinating with Putin, which doesn't seem at all impossible, then we have a *real* problem.
Some of his rhetoric on Greece today and on Wednesday has also been *mighty* familiar.
"There are nine US bases right now. They were established in Greece. Against whom were they established? The answer they give is ‘against Russia.’ We don’t buy it, take no offense,” Bloomberg quoted Erdogan as saying late on Wednesday during a joint press conference with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.""
Presumably the US sold Turkey advanced military equipment like F-16s to... errr... lull them into a false sense of security.
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
Or perhaps karma.
Is there a difference between karma and kismet? Never been quite sure.
Kismet is the will of Allah. AIUI. Whereas karma is cause and effect. Without any supernatural involvement. Those are the religious definitions. Not sure the difference is so stark in everyday usage. I reckon kismet is your "fate". Not much you can do about it. Karma is the inevitable results, over time, of your actions. So. Within your complete control.
Putin basically just stopped pretending: "During the war with Sweden, Peter the Great didn't conquer anything, he took back what had always belonged to us, even though all of Europe recognised it as Sweden's. It seems now it's our turn to get our lands back [smiling]". https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
What with Erdogan threatening the Greeks that he's not "joking" about wanting the Greek islands demilitarised, it seems a worrying day all round for threats and rhetoric. Meanwhile the same Erdogan is still blocking Sweden's entry.
It’s a change for Putin.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834 Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
The President of Russia, a disgraced ex-KGB agent, millionaire despite a modest salary, serial killer, notorious election forger and infamous love rat was lying about something?
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
The surprise is that he’s now being open about his intentions.
We’re past the annexation of the Sudetenland phase.
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
Or perhaps karma.
Is there a difference between karma and kismet? Never been quite sure.
Kismet is the will of Allah. AIUI. Whereas karma is cause and effect. Without any supernatural involvement.
I've always viewed karma as Newtonian principles in action.
For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
Off topic. Don't know much about professional golf. And it's rarely discussed on here. But WTF is going on? One issue I didn't foresee is golfers deciding they simply aren't paid enough. Can someone explain?
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Sorry Leon you are not reading the post. You enter and leave country X, you then go to Portugal with their super-duper e-gate. Because you haven't been recorded leaving country X you now can't enter Portugal. It makes not a jot of difference Portugal are efficient you are not getting in.
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
This is for arrivals from other Schengen countries? I assume this is a short/medium term problem while the various databases are integrated.
Any UK passport holder needs to ensure they are recorded arriving and leaving the EU otherwise they will incorrectly be recorded still being in the EU. When they subsequently arrive in the EU (even though it is blindly obvious they must have previously left) they will be deported, possibly fined and possibly banned from ever re-entering if they are recorded as being present for more than 90 days in 180. It has been an issue with passport stamps, but hopefully won't be an issue now it is automated, but people are paranoid as you just don't know.
Some years ago I entered America via Phoenix but left over the border to Mexico at Nogales, Mexico a few days later, so wasn't stamped as leaving USA. As such I was regarded as an illegal overstayer in the USA for some years. Fortunately I had been stamped leaving Mexico a fortnight after entering, so eventually got it sorted.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
Off topic. Don't know much about professional golf. And it's rarely discussed on here. But WTF is going on? One issue I didn't foresee is golfers deciding they simply aren't paid enough. Can someone explain?
Wimbledon security chiefs are on high alert for the threat of cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the tournament’s computer systems at this month’s championships in retaliation for the ban on Russian and Belarusian players.
Derbyshire Cricket Club are going to be in trouble soon if the ECB keeps wasting money on their matesvanity projects poor management. This at a time when they're doing pretty well on the field.
For a county with such a marvellous sporting heritage they're having a rough time right now.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
But is this really happening? Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever. There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
I’ve probably travelled internationally more than anyone on this forum, since Brexit
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA 2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too 3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what 4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
You keep repeating point 2 even though it has been explained over and over again this is not the issue. Portugal do have e-gates for British tourists NOW, but it doesn't stop the problems because Brits then queue to get their passports stamped anyway because of paranoia. I have given you previously 2 examples where it has gone badly wrong. And of course it is NOT a poor EU country issue, but an all country issue because it doesn't matter if Portugal have it cracked it if a previous trip to somewhere else has messed up your records. Portugal might be 100% efficient but if your exit from another country hasn't been recorded you are not getting in to Portugal for your hols.
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
No, that shows I’m right. Countries desperate for UK tourists (and the UK tourist £ is mighty indeed) will make it easier, then it just depends on the lower-watt moron UK tourists to catch up, which they will
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
Sorry Leon you are not reading the post. You enter and leave country X, you then go to Portugal with their super-duper e-gate. Because you haven't been recorded leaving country X you now can't enter Portugal. It makes not a jot of difference Portugal are efficient you are not getting in.
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
This is for arrivals from other Schengen countries? I assume this is a short/medium term problem while the various databases are integrated.
Any UK passport holder needs to ensure they are recorded arriving and leaving the EU otherwise they will incorrectly be recorded still being in the EU. When they subsequently arrive in the EU (even though it is blindly obvious they must have previously left) they will be deported, possibly fined and possibly banned from ever re-entering if they are recorded as being present for more than 90 days in 180. It has been an issue with passport stamps, but hopefully won't be an issue now it is automated, but people are paranoid as you just don't know.
So this is for arrivals from all countries. How is that going to work with the growing proliferation of e-gates?
I've not a clue how the technology works, but my understanding is you won't need a passport stamp and your details will be recorded. You are completely reliant that it works if you haven't got a stamp.
The other thing about passport queues and Brexit: it doesn’t matter whether they are all actually caused by Brexit or not. So long as someone is blaming them on it, that’s what will stick.
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
Or perhaps karma.
Is there a difference between karma and kismet? Never been quite sure.
Kismet is the will of Allah. AIUI. Whereas karma is cause and effect. Without any supernatural involvement. Those are the religious definitions. Not sure the difference is so stark in everyday usage.
It is he who saith not kismet, it is he who knows not fate. It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! It is he whose loss is laughter if he thinks the wager worth Put down your feet upon him that our peace be on the earth.
Lepanto was my favourite poem as a child. Brilliant imagery, superb historical allusions and fantastic language. Probably not PC though.
Comments
Not sure whether that's due to everything else going on, reining in discretionary spending, lack of interest, or the miserable weather.
Will be interesting to see if the Hundred has reasonable sales. Unless they're a big improvement on last year, cricket's finances for 2023 will look distinctly precarious.
At same period and somewhat later knew folks who were on party lines, with each separate phone having a distinct ring. Plus obligatory little old lady who listened into to all calls, as part of the service.
Jessica Elgot
@jessicaelgot
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44m
Mini exc - I’ve seen a new memo circulated by some key Tories before the VONC - Johnson’s speech was v interesting in how it spoke to some of its criticisms of his govt - pledging cutting taxes, cutting spending, cutting regulation.
The memo went round dozens of MPs previewing the launch of Steve Baker’s Conservative Way Forward (the revival of the Thatcherite group). A formal launch seems imminent. First page here, thought it’s longer
https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1534963893981921280
The punishment can only go so far.
(And the Lord's Test was anything but sold out, although that was due to the epochal stupidity of the ECB.)
Airports are certainly hellish, and the industry has fucked up massively. But the small sample of reports I have had of getting through passport control either into Europe or home again suggests no problems whatsoever.
There have been some people indignant that their passports were being stamped, which I think just amounted to those people indignant about Brexit, but in terms of getting through passport control I have heard many stories of seamlessness and no stories of long queues.
CCTV footage from the night of the Champions League final has been deleted, an official from the French Football Federation (FFF) confirmed on Thursday.
The CCTV footage may have justified — or undermined — claims by the French authorities that ticketless Liverpool supporters were to blame for chaotic scenes around the Stade de France before the final, which Real Madrid won 1-0.
France’s sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera and Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin have both sought to blame Liverpool fans.
Liverpool supporters, including families with children, were tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed outside the stadium by police ahead of the final on May 28.
Multiple eyewitnesses claim that after the match local gangs then assaulted and robbed fans from both teams making their way back to coaches and trains.
The French Senate is now investigating the incident.
But there is no video evidence to corroborate this as it has already been destroyed due to an apparent failure by officials to request copies.
Erwan Le Prevost, director of international relations at the FFF told the French Senate that CCTV footage of the stadium is automatically deleted after seven days.
As the footage had not been requested before the seven days were up, it was deleted.
He said: “The images are available for seven days. They are then automatically destroyed.
“We should have had a requisition to provide them to the different populations (organisations). The images are extremely violent.”
https://theathletic.com/news/stade-de-france-cctv-footage-from-champions-league-final-already-deleted/YnopFhd0wV10/
Russian state TV announces that the President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega invited Russian Armed Forces to enter his country in the second half of 2022. State TV host Olga Skabeeva said: "It's time for Russia to roll out something powerful closer to the American city upon a hill."
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1534900301442035714
I am wondering whether Johnson had his team send a few letters to get it brought forward?
And, yes, there is evidence of longer queues for Brits in the EEA, because Brexit. I’ve experienced it. Weirdly, the worst was in Switzerland last summer, an extra 30-40 minutes. Enough to be quite irritating
Four points tho:
1. Nothing has changed outside the EEA
2. It is in the interests of any poorer EU country dependant on British tourists, to fix this: so you can expect this to be a temporary issue in Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, where they will get a new system in place, probably Spain too
3. Right now the picture is befuddled and obscured by Covid problems, and it’s hard to work out what is causing what
4. Medium term, e-gates will solve all of these issues
Its daft, but its not specific to us (its any non-Schengen country). And besides which I assume that we support sovereign areas setting their own border policies to suit their own interests...
For the vast majority of people it isn't a problem. It hasn't been for me, except one not too long queue when the EU queue was empty, but that was just annoying rather than anything else.
The biggest issue of all those from anecdotal experience is the ridiculous performance of the e-gates. Last time all 3 of the people in front of me had to try about 5 times to get their passports read by the camera before having to abandon the gate and “seek assistance”. Worse than 5 years ago. Maybe there’s a new supplier at LHR.
I’ve managed to avoid the long non-EEA queue in European airports so far.
https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1534910119519178752
Now that this particular Rubicon has been crossed, we can expect the new tax to just keep creeping continuously upwards over the coming years, in lockstep with the ageing of the population. The problem of an ever-growing proportion of the people being decrepit and in need of more complex and expensive care interventions is going to be paid for by loading all the burden onto the backs of the correspondingly shrinking cohort of able bodied workers.
Countries like Turkey are making it a breeze to get in. Southern Med EU countries will have to compete or lose billions
For decades multiple things that were marginally or nothing to do with the EU were blamed on Brussels by the right wing press: immigration from outside the EU, health and safety regs that it turned out were stricter here than on the continent, VAT rules that it turned out were HMRC interpretation, all manner of other bureaucratic gold plating. But it stuck.
Every time there is chaos at airports (and face if that’s often), every time the economy turns down or inflation goes up, every time there’s a shortage of some sort of product, the pro-EU media will blame Brexit and it will stick. It’s symmetry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Polish-Lithuanian_Commonwealth_at_its_maximum_extent.svg
I assume this will become a vanishingly small issue as you say, but it has nothing to do with poor EU countries getting good systems to prevent it. It is out of their control.
I don't buy it - if they were so concerned about reaching the threshold too soon then many of them would have held off of post dated their letters. We know ones did that, Brady acknowledged it. So if those 'senior' figures are being truthful then all their own letters would have been post dated for after the by-elections.
I used to get up half an hour before I went to bed....
Portugal are showing the way with letting UK passports through the e-gates, and everywhere else with significant UK tourism or business travel will quickly follow. If Macron thinks it makes him more manly to let the Brits stand in line at the border, then they’ll go elsewhere to spend their cash in future.
https://twitter.com/TasminMahfuz/status/1534985079855976448
While foreign travel was quite common historically, it was a lot slower, and often only one way.
And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you
Started to be daily.
Desperate need for better doors.
You need to have something measurable and measure it. That's what the LSE blog I linked to elsewhere has done.
If your measure of social mobility is "proportion of MPs who are female" then you have a case for we've never had ti so good. But personally, that's not the measure I'd use.
Not entirely great for the peasants.
A modern democratic version would be interesting. Not entirely unlike, say, the EU.
There's always much more variability than people give credence to. You have similar sorts of effects with looking at historical data on life expectancy, or weather, or any number of things. Don't neglect variance.
Just a terrifying way to live.
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.
Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises a year ago on almost £900bn of reserves created by the quantitative easing process.
The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.
Jagjit Chadha, director of Niesr, said Sunak’s decisions had saddled the UK with “an enormous bill and heavy continuing exposure to interest rate risk”, adding that it was the Treasury’s fault.
“It would have been much better to have reduced the scale of short-term liabilities earlier, as we argued for some time, and to exploit the benefits of longer-term debt issuance,” he said.
https://www.ft.com/content/90025f48-858f-40c5-a011-3f285f05e775
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1534854688188792834
Many people urge (until now!) for a "deal" with Putin. Let's have a look on his promises. On Aug 28th 2008, after Russian attack on Georgia, Putin gave his interview to Germany's biggest TV channel ARD and said very clear, Russia recognises Ukrainian borders incl. Crimea. /1…
… On March 18th 2014, after annexation of Crimea, Putin hold his speech in Moscow, saying: "Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We don't want a partition of Ukraine". He lied. /4
Some of his rhetoric on Greece today and on Wednesday has also been *mighty* familiar.
"There are nine US bases right now. They were established in Greece. Against whom were they established? The answer they give is ‘against Russia.’ We don’t buy it, take no offense,” Bloomberg quoted Erdogan as saying late on Wednesday during a joint press conference with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_system
There are no free lunches.
Switzerland is not in the EEA.
[Pedant Mode Off]
Mrs C drew my attention to this rather wonderful painting only yesterday ...
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-tay-bridge-from-my-studio-window-92781
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Whereas karma is cause and effect. Without any supernatural involvement.
Those are the religious definitions. Not sure the difference is so stark in everyday usage.
I reckon kismet is your "fate". Not much you can do about it.
Karma is the inevitable results, over time, of your actions. So. Within your complete control.
We’re past the annexation of the Sudetenland phase.
Extra revenue would be useful at a time when living standards are being squeezed.
Full story here:
https://www.itv.com/news/2022-06-09/brexit-cost-the-uk-billions-in-lost-trade-and-tax-revenues-research-finds
For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.
And no, just coming up for Leuchars.
One issue I didn't foresee is golfers deciding they simply aren't paid enough.
Can someone explain?
Their poor fans.
Oh sorry, did you mean this financial SNAFU?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/630d5996-e7ec-11ec-aa87-2eea7c6e5b01?shareToken=61d0b1fe5585adcade6ed7663bff93be
their matesvanity projectspoor management. This at a time when they're doing pretty well on the field.For a county with such a marvellous sporting heritage they're having a rough time right now.
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter if he thinks the wager worth
Put down your feet upon him that our peace be on the earth.
Lepanto was my favourite poem as a child. Brilliant imagery, superb historical allusions and fantastic language.
Probably not PC though.