We've discussed this before - it's a niche product great for generating heat not really suitable as a source of electricity...
In places where heating is provided from a centralised location it's an efficient solution but we don't have many places like that so it's probably better elsewhere than the UK..
We've discussed this before - it's a niche product great for generating heat not really suitable as a source of electricity...
In places where heating is provided from a centralised location it's an efficient solution but we don't have many places like that so it's probably better elsewhere than the UK..
It could be rather more than niche given about a quarter of our total energy usage is on heating. Short term you're right, but the ability to store heat for quite long periods, with what's quite simple and cheap technology, could gain widespread use if we get to a point where there's a lot of zero marginal cost renewable electricity.
This is so far looking like an easy win for southern England after all – Charlwood has already provisionally broken the record. I suppose the chance for the likes of lowland Notts/south Yorks comes from them holding on to hottest air longer into the day.
Friends and Fam in SW reporting storms, cloud and rain
Question is if and when it gets to the east. Probs not fast enough to prevent 40C
Completely electorally suicidal, I'd guess, but something I'd like to see is the progressive shifting of the NI burden onto income tax and corporation tax under the guise of "open taxes."
Basically: "You pay this anyway, but they've done the 'stealth taxes' trick so much it's made things really complicated."
Set Income tax to 25%/45%. Corporation tax to 25%. NI down from 13.25% to 8% for employees and from 15.05% to 10% for employers.
See how that goes, with the intent of increasing the shift still further (I wouldn't be surprised if the tax take into the Treasury actually increased despite it being supposedly level under the latest ready reckoner). And then it can be really clear when taxes are increased and decreased.
It also helps with the ever-increasing problem of the IR35/self-employed trap the Treasury has been getting deeper and deeper into.
But, as I said. At the very least "courageous," if not "controversial."
Courageous is worse than controversial. "Controversial" means "this will lose you votes", "courageous" means "this will lose you the election".
This is so far looking like an easy win for southern England after all – Charlwood has already provisionally broken the record. I suppose the chance for the likes of lowland Notts/south Yorks comes from them holding on to hottest air longer into the day.
South Yorks will smash 40 and set the new record is what I'm hearing. Hotter than Bangkok has ever been. Which means way TOO hot.
I hope this is a Bob Beamon long jump type record - but I fear it won't be.
40.8 is the hottest ever in Bangkok apparently, which is weirdly low considering how it's eternally in the 30s there.
Yes. It's less than 14N though, so it's longest day is only 12h50m, and being in the tropics the heat of the day tends to kick off convection and rain which acts as a temperature limiter.
Deserts on Earth tend to be off the equator, where the Hadley circulation brings descending air and therefore puts a lid on convection and keeps the skies clear of cloud.
In the mid-latitudes we can get a mix of the two and so we have more variable weather.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
PM's package is PM for PM.
That's literally it.
I think that she is quite pleasant for a politician and I think she has enough real experience and empathy to relate well to people. She can help the party by showing that she gets normal. But she was grossly over promoted as Defence Secretary, I do not think that she is quite Cabinet material and the idea that she is PM material is frankly delusional and always has been.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
To give her the benefit of the doubt, "minimum wage" job is a fair shorthand for the work she was doing, even if it was just before the official minimum wage came in.
However, it is unlikely she paid much, if any tax, and suggesting that her low tax politics were formed because she was being taxed so highly is frankly bullshit.
Is it though? The income tax threshold was £4k in 1997 and the lower NI threshold about £3.2k.
So she'd have been paying both if she'd done it for more than a few months.
She'd have needed to work around 40 hours a week at £3 an hour for the whole year to be paying something like £20 tax on wages of £120. That's at the same time as doing A-levels, which are pretty time consuming.
Perhaps she was - I do know some people who did nothing but work/study, but even if she's really pushing it with the work hours, is tax of £20 from a £120 wage really that dramatic?
And if nobody paid any taxes then who would pay the salaries of her A-Level teachers?
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
To give her the benefit of the doubt, "minimum wage" job is a fair shorthand for the work she was doing, even if it was just before the official minimum wage came in.
However, it is unlikely she paid much, if any tax, and suggesting that her low tax politics were formed because she was being taxed so highly is frankly bullshit.
Is it though? The income tax threshold was £4k in 1997 and the lower NI threshold about £3.2k.
So she'd have been paying both if she'd done it for more than a few months.
She'd have needed to work around 40 hours a week at £3 an hour for the whole year to be paying something like £20 tax on wages of £120. That's at the same time as doing A-levels, which are pretty time consuming.
Perhaps she was - I do know some people who did nothing but work/study, but even if she's really pushing it with the work hours, is tax of £20 from a £120 wage really that dramatic?
It *sounds* dramatic today, but of course this isn't corrected for inflation! So the rhetoric works all the better.
I really do wonder if it was a case of tax deducted on the assumption of FT work - which would be a pain, and an immediate one - and only reclaimed later, much later (if she understood the need to do it, and how to do it: I am not being disparaging, lots of people found tax intimidating).
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
If Badenoch was working in McDonalds in London in 1997-98 then she was on £4 an hour. More than 10% higher than the minimum wage introduced in 1999.
So what?
Not exactly Goldman Sachs is it.
I mean, if you are happy with your preferred candidate telling easily disproven lies then more power to you.
I'm willing to accept this as a figure of speech rather than a categorical statement of truth that has found to be dishonest. Working for McDonalds flipping burgers is a "minimum-wage job" even if it was in the years before the minimum wage was introduced because it's the same type and status of work.
I think we need to get the guys from Britain First to tell us how they'd vote on every round of the Tory leadership contest - and, obviously, every other vote ever - so that we can make sure that we all vote exactly the opposite to them and we end up with their least favourite.
Because that's a really fucking sensible way to decide things.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
Except it wasn't an elision of the truth. She said she knows what its like. What she did was like that. Like doesn't mean identical to.
A pre-minimum wage job is like a minimum wage job. In fact, many would argue it was worse, which is why the minimum wage came in surely?
It really takes the biscuit to complain that someone is not telling the truth as they didn't have a minimum wage job, when they said they knew what it was like, because they actually had a pre-minimum wage one.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
No, the far bigger lie is to claim that cutting taxes will help the poor.
Making the point that in referring (accurately) to "decades of low growth" the leadership contenders (and esp Truss) are debunking the notion that Tory government is somehow better for the economy.
Important because if this myth can be punctured they will find it harder to win elections from now on - starting with the next one.
Didn't Blair and Brown (aided and abetted by the Conservative Party) puncture this in the 90s? It's cyclical, and I think the public are more willing to believe the Conservatives are generally better for the economy until evidence to the contrary is found. Once found, give it a couple of leaders and the public are right back to believing the Conservatives are better for the economy.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
PM's package is PM for PM.
That's literally it.
I think that she is quite pleasant for a politician and I think she has enough real experience and empathy to relate well to people. She can help the party by showing that she gets normal. But she was grossly over promoted as Defence Secretary, I do not think that she is quite Cabinet material and the idea that she is PM material is frankly delusional and always has been.
Respectfully disagree. There’s no reason why Penny couldn’t be a high ranking cabinet minister or even PM. I don’t think it comes down to ability. The thing she needs to work on is her sharpness and clarity of presentation, and to stop viewing everything through the prism of wanting to be liked (sound familiar to anyone?)
A lot of the stuff she’s come a cropper on doesn’t seem to me to come from a position of being fundamentally crap at her job, but more from wanting to be all things to all people and therefore creating a rod for her own back.
So we have a motion of confidence in the government proposed by the government. "I don' know why we're wasting our time debating my motion" says the PM. But later its important enough to de-whip Ellwood for agreeing with the PM that there are more important things to be doing.
Johnson really is a wazzock.
His man management is terrible. He's demanding, inconsistent, unsupportive and just generally a headache for MPs. They need a leader who understands it's a two way street.
Even feudal lords were expected to provide for their vassals (not that all met their obligations).
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
To give her the benefit of the doubt, "minimum wage" job is a fair shorthand for the work she was doing, even if it was just before the official minimum wage came in.
However, it is unlikely she paid much, if any tax, and suggesting that her low tax politics were formed because she was being taxed so highly is frankly bullshit.
Is it though? The income tax threshold was £4k in 1997 and the lower NI threshold about £3.2k.
So she'd have been paying both if she'd done it for more than a few months.
She'd have needed to work around 40 hours a week at £3 an hour for the whole year to be paying something like £20 tax on wages of £120. That's at the same time as doing A-levels, which are pretty time consuming.
Perhaps she was - I do know some people who did nothing but work/study, but even if she's really pushing it with the work hours, is tax of £20 from a £120 wage really that dramatic?
It *sounds* dramatic today, but of course this isn't corrected for inflation! So the rhetoric works all the better.
I really do wonder if it was a case of tax deducted on the assumption of FT work - which would be a pain, and an immediate one - and only reclaimed later, much later (if she understood the need to do it, and how to do it: I am not being disparaging, lots of people found tax intimidating).
That makes zero sense given that McDonalds is the sort of firm geared towards a lot of part time staff all being paid for the hours worked that week.
I think we needed to get the guys from Britain First to tell us how they'd vote on every round of the Tory leadership contest - and, obviously, every other vote ever - so that we can make sure that we all vote exactly the opposite to them and we end up with their least favourite.
Because that's a really fucking sensible way to decide things.
To demonstrate the wrongheadedness of that position, lets extrapolate it to a general election.
In a two/three horse GE race, Britain First's least favourite candidate would probably be Jeremy Corbyn. Ergo, we should all vote Jeremy Corbyn, right? or we're all racists?
This is so far looking like an easy win for southern England after all – Charlwood has already provisionally broken the record. I suppose the chance for the likes of lowland Notts/south Yorks comes from them holding on to hottest air longer into the day.
Friends and Fam in SW reporting storms, cloud and rain
Question is if and when it gets to the east. Probs not fast enough to prevent 40C
Plymouth is 21C and raining.
We're at 27-28 on the bottom of the Island, and I think that may be as hot as we get...it certainly feels hot enough, unlike yesterday there's no cloud
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
To give her the benefit of the doubt, "minimum wage" job is a fair shorthand for the work she was doing, even if it was just before the official minimum wage came in.
However, it is unlikely she paid much, if any tax, and suggesting that her low tax politics were formed because she was being taxed so highly is frankly bullshit.
Is it though? The income tax threshold was £4k in 1997 and the lower NI threshold about £3.2k.
So she'd have been paying both if she'd done it for more than a few months.
She'd have needed to work around 40 hours a week at £3 an hour for the whole year to be paying something like £20 tax on wages of £120. That's at the same time as doing A-levels, which are pretty time consuming.
Perhaps she was - I do know some people who did nothing but work/study, but even if she's really pushing it with the work hours, is tax of £20 from a £120 wage really that dramatic?
It *sounds* dramatic today, but of course this isn't corrected for inflation! So the rhetoric works all the better.
I really do wonder if it was a case of tax deducted on the assumption of FT work - which would be a pain, and an immediate one - and only reclaimed later, much later (if she understood the need to do it, and how to do it: I am not being disparaging, lots of people found tax intimidating).
That makes zero sense given that McDonalds is the sort of firm geared towards a lot of part time staff all being paid for the hours worked that week.
When I worked at McDonalds at the turn of the century you were taxed as if you always worked the hours worked for that period of time. So when I worked full time during the holidays, I was taxed full time, despite not working full time during term-time.
I doubt its much different now, I expect students working full time in the summer holidays are taxed full time still too.
I think we needed to get the guys from Britain First to tell us how they'd vote on every round of the Tory leadership contest - and, obviously, every other vote ever - so that we can make sure that we all vote exactly the opposite to them and we end up with their least favourite.
Because that's a really fucking sensible way to decide things.
To demonstrate the wrongheadedness of that position, lets extrapolate it to a general election.
In a two/three horse GE race, Britain First's least favourite candidate would probably be Jeremy Corbyn. Ergo, we should all vote Jeremy Corbyn, right? or we're all racists?
Choosing who/what to vote for on the basis of who supports it is bad. Choosing who/what to vote for on the basis of who opposes it is worse.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
There is a possibility that we're wrong on this.
She has said she was doing A-Levels part time, and that her family were struggling in Nigeria when they sent her over to stay with a friend of the family. I worked with a lot of Nigerians around this time, and many middle class children stayed with relatively well off friends of their families in the UK, however, it's equally likely she was having to pay much of her own way, and *was* expected/needed to work long hours to support herself through college.
We've discussed this before - it's a niche product great for generating heat not really suitable as a source of electricity...
In places where heating is provided from a centralised location it's an efficient solution but we don't have many places like that so it's probably better elsewhere than the UK..
It could be rather more than niche given about a quarter of our total energy usage is on heating. Short term you're right, but the ability to store heat for quite long periods, with what's quite simple and cheap technology, could gain widespread use if we get to a point where there's a lot of zero marginal cost renewable electricity.
The thing to understand is that it will only work at a certain volume (remember the battle here is controlling heat loss) - so it's great for communal or district heating stations not so great for individual central heating boilers in a home.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I disagree but I have to recognise that it is also possible. In my adult life (ie able to vote) there have been all of 2 changes of power. If there is another one in late 2024, early 2025 that may well see me out.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
Except it wasn't an elision of the truth. She said she knows what its like. What she did was like that. Like doesn't mean identical to.
A pre-minimum wage job is like a minimum wage job. In fact, many would argue it was worse, which is why the minimum wage came in surely?
It really takes the biscuit to complain that someone is not telling the truth as they didn't have a minimum wage job, when they said they knew what it was like, because they actually had a pre-minimum wage one.
A decent defence.
Though it's still a bit like Truss complaining about her inadequate education under a Conservative government. Had her party had its way, we might still have pre-minimum wage jobs.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
There is a possibility that we're wrong on this.
She has said she was doing A-Levels part time, and that her family were struggling in Nigeria when they sent her over to stay with a friend of the family. I worked with a lot of Nigerians around this time, and many middle class children stayed with relatively well off friends of their families in the UK, however, it's equally likely she was having to pay much of her own way, and *was* expected/needed to work long hours to support herself through college.
My wife was in a very similar situation - she was lucky that she got into baby sitting, where, after the baby was in bed she could study until midnight. She was putting in mad hours a week to pay fees, food & accommodation. First generation immigrant from family who were poor by UK standards (middle class at home).
At university I saw that some of the overseas students were doing this as well - massive hours to pay the full overseas fees.
Private tuition, incidentally has become a god send for people in this situation - they can now get £30+ an hour for online tuition for GCSE/A Level in their subject(s).
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
To give her the benefit of the doubt, "minimum wage" job is a fair shorthand for the work she was doing, even if it was just before the official minimum wage came in.
However, it is unlikely she paid much, if any tax, and suggesting that her low tax politics were formed because she was being taxed so highly is frankly bullshit.
Is it though? The income tax threshold was £4k in 1997 and the lower NI threshold about £3.2k.
So she'd have been paying both if she'd done it for more than a few months.
She'd have needed to work around 40 hours a week at £3 an hour for the whole year to be paying something like £20 tax on wages of £120. That's at the same time as doing A-levels, which are pretty time consuming.
Perhaps she was - I do know some people who did nothing but work/study, but even if she's really pushing it with the work hours, is tax of £20 from a £120 wage really that dramatic?
It *sounds* dramatic today, but of course this isn't corrected for inflation! So the rhetoric works all the better.
I really do wonder if it was a case of tax deducted on the assumption of FT work - which would be a pain, and an immediate one - and only reclaimed later, much later (if she understood the need to do it, and how to do it: I am not being disparaging, lots of people found tax intimidating).
That makes zero sense given that McDonalds is the sort of firm geared towards a lot of part time staff all being paid for the hours worked that week.
When I worked at McDonalds at the turn of the century you were taxed as if you always worked the hours worked for that period of time. So when I worked full time during the holidays, I was taxed full time, despite not working full time during term-time.
I doubt its much different now, I expect students working full time in the summer holidays are taxed full time still too.
Yes. The NI was made with each pay period, but the income tax was over-deducted if you were doing your year’s worth of hours in three months. Often resulted in a very welcome cheque from Hector a few months down the line.
It does feel like the tories are in a death spiral and will lose the next general election, for the simple reason that they are fighting themselves on issues that are irrellevant to most people in this country. Its a bit like a repeat of the the mid 1990's with tory MP's banging on about Europe. The probable legacy of this leadership contest is going to be massive defeats over legislation.
Quite amusing that 'free marketeer' Badenoch now wants to protect the Green Belt. No doubt electoral compromise is already kicking in.
This is so far looking like an easy win for southern England after all – Charlwood has already provisionally broken the record. I suppose the chance for the likes of lowland Notts/south Yorks comes from them holding on to hottest air longer into the day.
South Yorks will smash 40 and set the new record is what I'm hearing. Hotter than Bangkok has ever been. Which means way TOO hot.
I hope this is a Bob Beamon long jump type record - but I fear it won't be.
40.8 is the hottest ever in Bangkok apparently, which is weirdly low considering how it's eternally in the 30s there.
40.2 on Taiwan. It's the humidity. Much less pleasant than this.
It does feel like the tories are in a death spiral and will lose the next general election, for the simple reason that they are fighting themselves on issues that are irrellevant to most people in this country. Its a bit like a repeat of the the mid 1990's with tory MP's banging on about Europe. The probable legacy of this leadership contest is going to be massive defeats over legislation.
Quite amusing that 'free marketeer' Badenoch now wants to protect the Green Belt. No doubt electoral compromise is already kicking in.
She's going to have reduce immigration a lot if she wishes to protect the Green Belt.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
There is a possibility that we're wrong on this.
She has said she was doing A-Levels part time, and that her family were struggling in Nigeria when they sent her over to stay with a friend of the family. I worked with a lot of Nigerians around this time, and many middle class children stayed with relatively well off friends of their families in the UK, however, it's equally likely she was having to pay much of her own way, and *was* expected/needed to work long hours to support herself through college.
Agreed.
I actually did try to fact check all of this, but it's very difficult to find anything more than "flipped burgers at 16".
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
To give her the benefit of the doubt, "minimum wage" job is a fair shorthand for the work she was doing, even if it was just before the official minimum wage came in.
However, it is unlikely she paid much, if any tax, and suggesting that her low tax politics were formed because she was being taxed so highly is frankly bullshit.
Is it though? The income tax threshold was £4k in 1997 and the lower NI threshold about £3.2k.
So she'd have been paying both if she'd done it for more than a few months.
She'd have needed to work around 40 hours a week at £3 an hour for the whole year to be paying something like £20 tax on wages of £120. That's at the same time as doing A-levels, which are pretty time consuming.
Perhaps she was - I do know some people who did nothing but work/study, but even if she's really pushing it with the work hours, is tax of £20 from a £120 wage really that dramatic?
It *sounds* dramatic today, but of course this isn't corrected for inflation! So the rhetoric works all the better.
I really do wonder if it was a case of tax deducted on the assumption of FT work - which would be a pain, and an immediate one - and only reclaimed later, much later (if she understood the need to do it, and how to do it: I am not being disparaging, lots of people found tax intimidating).
That makes zero sense given that McDonalds is the sort of firm geared towards a lot of part time staff all being paid for the hours worked that week.
When I worked at McDonalds at the turn of the century you were taxed as if you always worked the hours worked for that period of time. So when I worked full time during the holidays, I was taxed full time, despite not working full time during term-time.
I doubt its much different now, I expect students working full time in the summer holidays are taxed full time still too.
Yes. The NI was made with each pay period, but the income tax was over-deducted if you were doing your year’s worth of hours in three months. Often resulted in a very welcome cheque from Hector a few months down the line.
Oh the joys of income tax calculations with x months of the tax year remaining...
I did wonder what BR was on about but that makes sense...
Kirkwall is heading today for a low of 13C with light rain and gentle breeze. June is over and Scotland is back to its 11 month winter. Nothing beats UK weather.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
Except it wasn't an elision of the truth. She said she knows what its like. What she did was like that. Like doesn't mean identical to.
A pre-minimum wage job is like a minimum wage job. In fact, many would argue it was worse, which is why the minimum wage came in surely?
It really takes the biscuit to complain that someone is not telling the truth as they didn't have a minimum wage job, when they said they knew what it was like, because they actually had a pre-minimum wage one.
A decent defence.
Though it's still a bit like Truss complaining about her inadequate education under a Conservative government. Had her party had its way, we might still have pre-minimum wage jobs.
Its just like it, yes, people go into politics to change things and not everything prior governments (even prior governments of your own party) did was correct.
As for Truss, its worth remembering that she was brought up in a comprehensive in a Labour Council, with a Labour LEA, before politicians from Blair onwards in recent years sought to bring education more into national government politics and away from LEA/local council politics.
By the time Truss entered Parliament, Parliament was already an increasingly common place for education reform whereas when she was a child it was more commonly LEAs in charge.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I disagree but I have to recognise that it is also possible. In my adult life (ie able to vote) there have been all of 2 changes of power. If there is another one in late 2024, early 2025 that may well see me out.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
There was an idea around 2010 that Labour required a period of time in opposition for renewal and that they'd be back when Cameron was exposed for being an empty suit. Seeing opposition as a choice to make is the ultimate in political self-indulgence and a party might find that a period in opposition stretches longer than they imagined.
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I disagree but I have to recognise that it is also possible. In my adult life (ie able to vote) there have been all of 2 changes of power. If there is another one in late 2024, early 2025 that may well see me out.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
There was an idea around 2010 that Labour required a period of time in opposition for renewal and that they'd be back when Cameron was exposed for being an empty suit. Seeing opposition as a choice to make is the ultimate in political self-indulgence and a party might find that a period in opposition stretches longer than they imagined.
It does feel like the tories are in a death spiral and will lose the next general election, for the simple reason that they are fighting themselves on issues that are irrellevant to most people in this country. Its a bit like a repeat of the the mid 1990's with tory MP's banging on about Europe. The probable legacy of this leadership contest is going to be massive defeats over legislation.
Quite amusing that 'free marketeer' Badenoch now wants to protect the Green Belt. No doubt electoral compromise is already kicking in.
She's going to have reduce immigration a lot if she wishes to protect the Green Belt.
Another "I'm all right, Jack". "Pull the ladder up behind you", merchant.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
No, the far bigger lie is to claim that cutting taxes will help the poor.
Raising the tax free personal allowance by the Lib Dems in the coalition did exactly that.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I disagree but I have to recognise that it is also possible. In my adult life (ie able to vote) there have been all of 2 changes of power. If there is another one in late 2024, early 2025 that may well see me out.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
There was an idea around 2010 that Labour required a period of time in opposition for renewal and that they'd be back when Cameron was exposed for being an empty suit. Seeing opposition as a choice to make is the ultimate in political self-indulgence and a party might find that a period in opposition stretches longer than they imagined.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I disagree but I have to recognise that it is also possible. In my adult life (ie able to vote) there have been all of 2 changes of power. If there is another one in late 2024, early 2025 that may well see me out.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
I think your last point sums it up perfectly. I think even a decade may be underestimating it. Its no good Badenoch inheriting the earth if been scorched by horrendous policy decisions.
I think this conservative administration might be something like the last Liberal majority administration of 1906. It won a landslide, made great reforms and guided us through war, and yet it was clear it just wasn't designed to represent either of the political tribes that the country was morphing into post WWI.
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
That sorta seems meanly pedantic. 'Burger flipping' is well known to mean working behind the counter at a burger place, and 'minimum wage' means very low wage. The alternative was to say: "I stood in front of a double-sided grill cooking burgers, and occasionally served fries and shakes as well, for £2.50 an hour when an average wage was £6.90 an hour, pre-tax."
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Is that REALLY an attack line ?!
I once did a job "Flipping burgers" at Burgerking (About the same time that Kemi would have actually) , and yes no burgers were actually flipped. It's a fair expression to use if you're working in fast food.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
PM's package is PM for PM.
That's literally it.
Not sure what she'd do if her initials were something else. Still, you have to make the most of what you have.
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Is that REALLY an attack line ?!
I once did a job "Flipping burgers" at Burgerking (About the same time that Kemi would have actually) , and yes no burgers were actually flipped. It's a fair expression to use if you're working in fast food.
Lines like that, are why everyone in politics really needs to get off Twitter.
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Really? Flipping burgers is simply the more poetic way to refer to the job, rather than being pedantic about the precise method of burger cooking. As criticism go this is risible.
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Pathetic.
As someone who working in McDonalds in the early 00s (on the tills), the staff working in the kitchen were referred to as burger flipping even if there was no literal flipping apart from taking the burgers from the grill to the bun.
That is the term that has always been used.
Again, I'm sure the fact she was working pre-minimum wage really demeans her ability to know what its "like" working for minimum wage. 🤦♂️
Interestingly as an anecdote, I'm completely unsurprised that Kemi was working as 'burger flipping'. It was never an official policy I suspect, but in the restaurant I worked at the till staff like myself were almost exclusively white, while the burger flippers in the kitchen were almost exclusively not. Its rather sad actually how even so recently as then racial segregation (even if all were paid the same) was the default norm. I wonder how many places that is still the norm? 👎
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Starmer went to a school that became private while he was there.
As that is the only piece of being "posh" that the Tory party have on SKS it continually appears in the hope that people have never investigated the detail.
For those who have investigated the detail it's a pack of lies that confirms (again) that the Tory party are dishonest.
A bit like Kemi's claim in the Telegraph: " I know what it's like flipping burgers at 16, on minimum wage, and then watching my pay slip away to taxes..."
The minimum wage didn't exist in 1996 (and would she have been paying income tax ?).
The personal allowance was only about 4k or so then so it's entirely possible. I worked in Tescos around the same time, and remember there being some tax.
She'd have to have been working full time throughout the whole year at McDonalds, while doing her A-levels. Even then, if she's working 40 hours (which is tough during A-Levels), she'd earn maybe £120 and still take home over £100.
That's not exactly watching your pay slip away to taxes.
🤨
For someone counting every penny and earning only £120 losing £20 to taxes does indeed feel like watching it slip away.
What's wrong with paying taxes? Services don't come for free you know.
Pay for the services then.
Taxes should be kept low, but too many services that ought to be privately paid for, are paid for out of taxes instead.
Oh, like hospitals? Fire stations?, schools? ICBMs? Why don't you talk some sense sometimes.
You might want to have a look at what proportion of taxes actually goes on ICBMs, schools, fire stations or the NHS and what proportion of taxes goes on stuff I'd quite happily oppose it going on.
Our taxes could be much, much lower, if our spending was lower.
Strategically, the problem is we spend an awful lot to keep over 65s in clover during the last 20 years of their lives. Both on the NHS, benefits and pensions (spend) and in removing NI and protecting house prices (tax).
That's where a rebalance is needed. It should more into education, science, R&D, infrastructure, defence and crime & justice.
Older citizens need to work more for longer (flexibly, of course) and use their own resources more.
Technically, we now spend an awful lot to keep over 66s in clover, as the pension age is being increased. But, yes, I agree with you and Bart about the need for a rebalance. We could increase the pension age further than current plans. We could build more houses and tax house price wealth.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
Except it wasn't an elision of the truth. She said she knows what its like. What she did was like that. Like doesn't mean identical to.
A pre-minimum wage job is like a minimum wage job. In fact, many would argue it was worse, which is why the minimum wage came in surely?
It really takes the biscuit to complain that someone is not telling the truth as they didn't have a minimum wage job, when they said they knew what it was like, because they actually had a pre-minimum wage one.
A decent defence.
Though it's still a bit like Truss complaining about her inadequate education under a Conservative government. Had her party had its way, we might still have pre-minimum wage jobs.
Its just like it, yes, people go into politics to change things and not everything prior governments (even prior governments of your own party) did was correct.
As for Truss, its worth remembering that she was brought up in a comprehensive in a Labour Council, with a Labour LEA, before politicians from Blair onwards in recent years sought to bring education more into national government politics and away from LEA/local council politics.
By the time Truss entered Parliament, Parliament was already an increasingly common place for education reform whereas when she was a child it was more commonly LEAs in charge.
The problem was lack of resources from the government of the time, not the politics of the LEA.
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
She didn't say that she was on the minimum wage. She said she knows what it's like to be on the minimum wage. Seems fair enough to me.
"Our country can still be so much better. Better for those working hard to make ends meet like I did on minimum wage, flipping burgers at McDonald's all those years ago.” <- direct quote
It does feel like the tories are in a death spiral and will lose the next general election, for the simple reason that they are fighting themselves on issues that are irrellevant to most people in this country. Its a bit like a repeat of the the mid 1990's with tory MP's banging on about Europe. The probable legacy of this leadership contest is going to be massive defeats over legislation.
Quite amusing that 'free marketeer' Badenoch now wants to protect the Green Belt. No doubt electoral compromise is already kicking in.
Fast forward to autumn. A man with a 750 million pound fortune is going around Britain telling people choosing between heat and eat that now is not the time for tax cuts. And not just a few of them. Millions.
He says he empathises with them and the poorest of them might get a further handout. When pressed on their plight he gets tetchy and irritable and refuses to answer some questions.
In what universe is that a recipe for election victory in England?
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
PM's package is PM for PM.
That's literally it.
Not sure what she'd do if her initials were something else. Still, you have to make the most of what you have.
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
No, the far bigger lie is to claim that cutting taxes will help the poor.
Raising the tax free personal allowance by the Lib Dems in the coalition did exactly that.
Cuts in corporation tax, not so much.
I'd agree with the PA raise. I'd also appreciate the indexlinking of the allowance as well. If you pay a small amount of tax due to PT work no reduction in the tax rate will help, whereas removal from the tax band will.
Unless something utterly dramatic happens, the UK is going to break 40C. Astonishing
A huge complex of concrete, infrastucture, cars, air con and jet engines gets hot you say ?
It won't just be Heathrow, you silly person
If the same location was wild land it would be 5/6 degrees cooler. Measuring temperatures in heat islands is a fantastic way to break temperature records.
Truss would be Labour's preferred opponent, for sure. Mordaunt probably their least preferred of the three likely to make it. I reckon the final round is something like Sunak 135, Mordaunt 116, Truss 106 with Mordaunt winning the members, although I think Sunak is the strongest candidate and he could still beat Mordaunt given the resources behind his campaign and the fact that Mordaunt is still quite untested and could blow up.
Mordaunt has done a great deal of blowing up already, it's unlikely that she will stop doing so under the pressure of hustings and further TV appearances.
Not quite as much in the Navy as we were led to believe though.
To me, she seriously lacks substance. I don't agree with Truss's ideas on economic policy but at least she is offering a fairly clear alternative with some degree of coherence. I genuinely don't know what PM is offering as a package. Unfunded tax cuts which she doesn't seem to know what they would cost (principally the increase in personal allowances) but nothing inflationary, no sirree.
I agree, Mordaunt is vacuous and would be a very bad choice. The same is true of Truss but she is a more obvious fake and is exceptionally easy to dislike. Badenoch is much better than either of them, but still has a lot to learn (see the 'minimum wage' storm-in-a-teacup for a trivial illustration). She is nowhere near ready to be catapulted into No10 at a time of multiple national crises. .
That leaves one serious candidate. He's not great, but he's the only credible one left. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, its been that way since the start really. Only the Conhome polling suggested any real doubt.
In two and half years since getting a huge majority, the conservatives have delivered continuity Brownism. If Sunak gets the top job, you can make that five years.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I disagree but I have to recognise that it is also possible. In my adult life (ie able to vote) there have been all of 2 changes of power. If there is another one in late 2024, early 2025 that may well see me out.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
There was an idea around 2010 that Labour required a period of time in opposition for renewal and that they'd be back when Cameron was exposed for being an empty suit. Seeing opposition as a choice to make is the ultimate in political self-indulgence and a party might find that a period in opposition stretches longer than they imagined.
The meme from those properly ITK at the time on here was 'soft landing achieved'.
I'm not entirely sure they've actually landed yet, to be bluntly honest.
It does feel like the tories are in a death spiral and will lose the next general election, for the simple reason that they are fighting themselves on issues that are irrellevant to most people in this country. Its a bit like a repeat of the the mid 1990's with tory MP's banging on about Europe. The probable legacy of this leadership contest is going to be massive defeats over legislation.
Quite amusing that 'free marketeer' Badenoch now wants to protect the Green Belt. No doubt electoral compromise is already kicking in.
She's going to have reduce immigration a lot if she wishes to protect the Green Belt.
That's code for appealing to past-obsessed Nimbies.
The Green Belt is a led-by-London policy response from 1935-1955.
Starmer went to a school that became private while he was there.
As that is the only piece of being "posh" that the Tory party have on SKS it continually appears in the hope that people have never investigated the detail.
For those who have investigated the detail it's a pack of lies that confirms (again) that the Tory party are dishonest.
A bit like Kemi's claim in the Telegraph: " I know what it's like flipping burgers at 16, on minimum wage, and then watching my pay slip away to taxes..."
The minimum wage didn't exist in 1996 (and would she have been paying income tax ?).
The personal allowance was only about 4k or so then so it's entirely possible. I worked in Tescos around the same time, and remember there being some tax.
She'd have to have been working full time throughout the whole year at McDonalds, while doing her A-levels. Even then, if she's working 40 hours (which is tough during A-Levels), she'd earn maybe £120 and still take home over £100.
That's not exactly watching your pay slip away to taxes.
🤨
For someone counting every penny and earning only £120 losing £20 to taxes does indeed feel like watching it slip away.
What's wrong with paying taxes? Services don't come for free you know.
Pay for the services then.
Taxes should be kept low, but too many services that ought to be privately paid for, are paid for out of taxes instead.
Doesn't really leave the just about managing better off though, does it? Pay less tax but pay more for specific services. Whatever else it does, the NHS is good at cost control.
Absolute rubbish the NHS spends money like a drunken sailor in a brothel. Company I worked for had a phone app that worked on cheap androids for hospitals to replace their pager systems. What was the nhs request can we make it work on iphones.....note use of this app meant nothing else would run on the phone deliberately so wasnt just people wanting to put it on their iphones. the hospitals bought phones specially for the app and issued them to staff at the start of their shift. Then collected them after the shift for reissue.
So please explain how wanting to use an iphone costing hundreds instead of a 30£ android shows how good the NHS is at cost control
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Christ.
Ask him how he got the burgers off the effing grill.
Unless something utterly dramatic happens, the UK is going to break 40C. Astonishing
A huge complex of concrete, infrastucture, cars, air con and jet engines gets hot you say ?
It won't just be Heathrow, you silly person
If the same location was wild land it would be 5/6 degrees cooler. Measuring temperatures in heat islands is a fantastic way to break temperature records.
Measuring temperatures where nobody lives is of limited utility to most people, though.
In years to come, as we crouch in our dark, smelly, lead-lined Special Asbestos Heat Resistant Day-Tombs, eating lumps of sun-dried algae, we will look back on this day and chuckle, ruefully
Unless something utterly dramatic happens, the UK is going to break 40C. Astonishing
A huge complex of concrete, infrastucture, cars, air con and jet engines gets hot you say ?
It won't just be Heathrow, you silly person
If the same location was wild land it would be 5/6 degrees cooler. Measuring temperatures in heat islands is a fantastic way to break temperature records.
Urban myth (no pun intended!) this. Kew Gardens tracks LHR temperatures quite closely.
I think we needed to get the guys from Britain First to tell us how they'd vote on every round of the Tory leadership contest - and, obviously, every other vote ever - so that we can make sure that we all vote exactly the opposite to them and we end up with their least favourite.
Because that's a really fucking sensible way to decide things.
To demonstrate the wrongheadedness of that position, lets extrapolate it to a general election.
In a two/three horse GE race, Britain First's least favourite candidate would probably be Jeremy Corbyn. Ergo, we should all vote Jeremy Corbyn, right? or we're all racists?
Choosing who/what to vote for on the basis of who supports it is bad. Choosing who/what to vote for on the basis of who opposes it is worse.
That's true. But the other extreme isn't great either. Many seem to believe that paying no regard whatsoever to the type of people who are agreeing with an opinion they have is a sign of robust independence of thought. It isn't. It's a sign of bone-headed arrogance.
David Wilcock @DavidTWilcock As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Its a totally common parlance for working in a burger chain...I think anybody who has worked in one of these chain places will describe their experience as they did something like burger flipping* on minimum wage (regardless of if there was an official minimum wage). Personally, my experience was Pizza Hut...free pizza every day...woohooo...
* particularly in US, everybody describes these kind of job like this.
I did my bit by having the central heating on full blast....
"The fact is that one of America’s two major political parties appears to be viscerally opposed to any policy that seems to serve the public good. Overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of such policies doesn’t help — if anything, it hurts, because the modern G.O.P. is hostile to science and scientists.
And that hostility, rather than the personal quirks of one small-state senator, is the fundamental reason we appear set to do nothing while the planet burns."
And this shows why I'm not backing Badenoch. Culture war BS is the wrong kind of right wing. Low tax economics etc is what we need, not banging on about BLM.
Re our brief conversation from yesterday - I suspect we're very similar on social issues, but different on economics, where I'm to your left.
Would be interesting to know with Badenoch how much of it is really personal opinion and how much is playing up to the (supposed) biases of the membership - and maybe some of the MPs. To get on as a black MP in the Con party, does she have to come out against BLM? (if, indeed, she has)
(not particularly tagetting the Cons here - to get on as a priviliged white male in Labour, do you need to come out as superwoke?)
Badenoch has been very anti-BLM for years. I don't think she's putting anything on. She's a hard right Tory. If you want to be more specific, she seems to be on the libertarian wing. We also know she lies (she wasn't on minimum wage because there wasn't a minimum wage). We also know she U-turns (against Net Zero, for Net Zero, against Net Zero in one day). She's Nadine Dorries with somewhat more brains.
I won't fault her for saying she was on Minimum wage before the minimum wage existed it just means she was on a low wage.
Now if she claimed that her pay rose as Major and Clark introduced the minimum then I would call that a lie
First minimum wage was £3.60, introduced in 1999. I remember this, because I got an 80% pay rise (up from £2.00) when it was introduced, at my job with the Student Union Entertainments team.
Kemi was born in 1980, she’d have been 19 when it was first introduced.
She worked at McDonald's when doing her A'levels. I presume she'd finished her A'levels by the time she was 19.
So she might have been on a minimal wage rather than an official minimum wage.
Why does this matter?
Because she said she was on the minimum wage? It's not a big lie, and maybe not a deliberate lie at all, but I was hoping that after Johnson we might see a return to honesty, accuracy and integrity in public life, rather than people just saying whatever is convenient.
The quote was "...when I was 16..", so it wasn't minimum wage, and it seems doubtful that she was working a 40hour week.
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
Except it wasn't an elision of the truth. She said she knows what its like. What she did was like that. Like doesn't mean identical to.
A pre-minimum wage job is like a minimum wage job. In fact, many would argue it was worse, which is why the minimum wage came in surely?
It really takes the biscuit to complain that someone is not telling the truth as they didn't have a minimum wage job, when they said they knew what it was like, because they actually had a pre-minimum wage one.
A decent defence.
Though it's still a bit like Truss complaining about her inadequate education under a Conservative government. Had her party had its way, we might still have pre-minimum wage jobs.
Its just like it, yes, people go into politics to change things and not everything prior governments (even prior governments of your own party) did was correct.
As for Truss, its worth remembering that she was brought up in a comprehensive in a Labour Council, with a Labour LEA, before politicians from Blair onwards in recent years sought to bring education more into national government politics and away from LEA/local council politics.
By the time Truss entered Parliament, Parliament was already an increasingly common place for education reform whereas when she was a child it was more commonly LEAs in charge.
The problem was lack of resources from the government of the time, not the politics of the LEA.
Completely disagreed.
Resources spent on education through the 80s was the same orhigher as a proportion of GDP than it is now. Politically motivated LEAs made some terrible choices despite having the resources, because they could blame central government for anything that went wrong while pushing their own agenda unaccountably and without competition.
Starmer went to a school that became private while he was there.
As that is the only piece of being "posh" that the Tory party have on SKS it continually appears in the hope that people have never investigated the detail.
For those who have investigated the detail it's a pack of lies that confirms (again) that the Tory party are dishonest.
A bit like Kemi's claim in the Telegraph: " I know what it's like flipping burgers at 16, on minimum wage, and then watching my pay slip away to taxes..."
The minimum wage didn't exist in 1996 (and would she have been paying income tax ?).
The personal allowance was only about 4k or so then so it's entirely possible. I worked in Tescos around the same time, and remember there being some tax.
She'd have to have been working full time throughout the whole year at McDonalds, while doing her A-levels. Even then, if she's working 40 hours (which is tough during A-Levels), she'd earn maybe £120 and still take home over £100.
That's not exactly watching your pay slip away to taxes.
🤨
For someone counting every penny and earning only £120 losing £20 to taxes does indeed feel like watching it slip away.
What's wrong with paying taxes? Services don't come for free you know.
Pay for the services then.
Taxes should be kept low, but too many services that ought to be privately paid for, are paid for out of taxes instead.
Oh, like hospitals? Fire stations?, schools? ICBMs? Why don't you talk some sense sometimes.
You might want to have a look at what proportion of taxes actually goes on ICBMs, schools, fire stations or the NHS and what proportion of taxes goes on stuff I'd quite happily oppose it going on.
Our taxes could be much, much lower, if our spending was lower.
Strategically, the problem is we spend an awful lot to keep over 65s in clover during the last 20 years of their lives. Both on the NHS, benefits and pensions (spend) and in removing NI and protecting house prices (tax).
That's where a rebalance is needed. It should more into education, science, R&D, infrastructure, defence and crime & justice.
Older citizens need to work more for longer (flexibly, of course) and use their own resources more.
Technically, we now spend an awful lot to keep over 66s in clover, as the pension age is being increased. But, yes, I agree with you and Bart about the need for a rebalance. We could increase the pension age further than current plans. We could build more houses and tax house price wealth.
I can't help feeling however that this rebalanced will be achieved just as the generation which benefitted from every postwar policy position dies and just as the generation which has spent its life subsidising the one above eventually gets to its moment in the sun.
Unless something utterly dramatic happens, the UK is going to break 40C. Astonishing
A huge complex of concrete, infrastucture, cars, air con and jet engines gets hot you say ?
It won't just be Heathrow, you silly person
If the same location was wild land it would be 5/6 degrees cooler. Measuring temperatures in heat islands is a fantastic way to break temperature records.
Charlwood is quite rural.
Besides, not all "wild land" is cooler. Sandy grasslands round here are exceedingly hot.
Comments
Chickens & counting..
Short term you're right, but the ability to store heat for quite long periods, with what's quite simple and cheap technology, could gain widespread use if we get to a point where there's a lot of zero marginal cost renewable electricity.
Deserts on Earth tend to be off the equator, where the Hadley circulation brings descending air and therefore puts a lid on convection and keeps the skies clear of cloud.
In the mid-latitudes we can get a mix of the two and so we have more variable weather.
The tories will never take power again in our lifetimes.
I'm sitting with a wet towel on my head and damp briefs.
I really do wonder if it was a case of tax deducted on the assumption of FT work - which would be a pain, and an immediate one - and only reclaimed later, much later (if she understood the need to do it, and how to do it: I am not being disparaging, lots of people found tax intimidating).
They are relatively minor points, but she is the one who's been criticising her opponents for similar elisions of the truth, which was why I noted it.
Because that's a really fucking sensible way to decide things.
A pre-minimum wage job is like a minimum wage job. In fact, many would argue it was worse, which is why the minimum wage came in surely?
It really takes the biscuit to complain that someone is not telling the truth as they didn't have a minimum wage job, when they said they knew what it was like, because they actually had a pre-minimum wage one.
Three places have now broken the record: Charlwood, Kew and LHR
And it’s still rising
London is HOT
A lot of the stuff she’s come a cropper on doesn’t seem to me to come from a position of being fundamentally crap at her job, but more from wanting to be all things to all people and therefore creating a rod for her own back.
Even feudal lords were expected to provide for their vassals (not that all met their obligations).
In a two/three horse GE race, Britain First's least favourite candidate would probably be Jeremy Corbyn. Ergo, we should all vote Jeremy Corbyn, right? or we're all racists?
https://www.avmet.ae/omdbfc.aspx
London is HOTTER than DUBAI right now!
I doubt its much different now, I expect students working full time in the summer holidays are taxed full time still too.
She has said she was doing A-Levels part time, and that her family were struggling in Nigeria when they sent her over to stay with a friend of the family. I worked with a lot of Nigerians around this time, and many middle class children stayed with relatively well off friends of their families in the UK, however, it's equally likely she was having to pay much of her own way, and *was* expected/needed to work long hours to support herself through college.
I've made this point before but the advantages of office seem to have increased sharply since 1979. You really need to screw up badly to get chucked out and when you do the political careers of all those at the top at that point are over. This idea that the the Tories can lose office to some minority Labour government, get a grip of themselves and then come swiftly back again is a dangerous delusion. If they lose they should count on being out of power for at least a decade.
Though it's still a bit like Truss complaining about her inadequate education under a Conservative government. Had her party had its way, we might still have pre-minimum wage jobs.
At university I saw that some of the overseas students were doing this as well - massive hours to pay the full overseas fees.
Private tuition, incidentally has become a god send for people in this situation - they can now get £30+ an hour for online tuition for GCSE/A Level in their subject(s).
It does feel like the tories are in a death spiral and will lose the next general election, for the simple reason that they are fighting themselves on issues that are irrellevant to most people in this country. Its a bit like a repeat of the the mid 1990's with tory MP's banging on about Europe. The probable legacy of this leadership contest is going to be massive defeats over legislation.
Quite amusing that 'free marketeer' Badenoch now wants to protect the Green Belt. No doubt electoral compromise is already kicking in.
I actually did try to fact check all of this, but it's very difficult to find anything more than "flipped burgers at 16".
I did wonder what BR was on about but that makes sense...
As for Truss, its worth remembering that she was brought up in a comprehensive in a Labour Council, with a Labour LEA, before politicians from Blair onwards in recent years sought to bring education more into national government politics and away from LEA/local council politics.
By the time Truss entered Parliament, Parliament was already an increasingly common place for education reform whereas when she was a child it was more commonly LEAs in charge.
David Wilcock
@DavidTWilcock
As someone else who worked at McDonalds in the mid-late 1990s, there was no burger flipping as grills were double-sided, and also no minimum wage.
Cuts in corporation tax, not so much.
I think this conservative administration might be something like the last Liberal majority administration of 1906. It won a landslide, made great reforms and guided us through war, and yet it was clear it just wasn't designed to represent either of the political tribes that the country was morphing into post WWI.
The rest is history.
I once did a job "Flipping burgers" at Burgerking (About the same time that Kemi would have actually) , and yes no burgers were actually flipped. It's a fair expression to use if you're working in fast food.
Unless something utterly dramatic happens, the UK is going to break 40C. Astonishing
As someone who working in McDonalds in the early 00s (on the tills), the staff working in the kitchen were referred to as burger flipping even if there was no literal flipping apart from taking the burgers from the grill to the bun.
That is the term that has always been used.
Again, I'm sure the fact she was working pre-minimum wage really demeans her ability to know what its "like" working for minimum wage. 🤦♂️
Interestingly as an anecdote, I'm completely unsurprised that Kemi was working as 'burger flipping'. It was never an official policy I suspect, but in the restaurant I worked at the till staff like myself were almost exclusively white, while the burger flippers in the kitchen were almost exclusively not. Its rather sad actually how even so recently as then racial segregation (even if all were paid the same) was the default norm. I wonder how many places that is still the norm? 👎
Met Office
@metoffice
·
1m
🌡️ For the first time ever, 40 Celsius has provisionally been exceeded in the UK
London Heathrow reported a temperature of 40.2°C at 12:50 today
https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1549362223889481733?s=20&t=yBsD1c9GqSjXxGQeZGsmRw
Loving it.
Equals the Taiwan record.
The point has been well-answered by myself and @Richard_Nabavi upthread.
I do not intend to dwell on it any longer.
WE DID IT, ALL OF US, WE DID IT
*sobs*
Fast forward to autumn. A man with a 750 million pound fortune is going around Britain telling people choosing between heat and eat that now is not the time for tax cuts. And not just a few of them. Millions.
He says he empathises with them and the poorest of them might get a further handout. When pressed on their plight he gets tetchy and irritable and refuses to answer some questions.
In what universe is that a recipe for election victory in England?
I'm not entirely sure they've actually landed yet, to be bluntly honest.
The Green Belt is a led-by-London policy response from 1935-1955.
So please explain how wanting to use an iphone costing hundreds instead of a 30£ android shows how good the NHS is at cost control
Ask him how he got the burgers off the effing grill.
Also, top tip, the litter patrol wasn't a bad gig - 30 minutes every couple of hours outside.
* particularly in US, everybody describes these kind of job like this.
And that hostility, rather than the personal quirks of one small-state senator, is the fundamental reason we appear set to do nothing while the planet burns."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/opinion/climate-politics-manchin.html
Resources spent on education through the 80s was the same orhigher as a proportion of GDP than it is now. Politically motivated LEAs made some terrible choices despite having the resources, because they could blame central government for anything that went wrong while pushing their own agenda unaccountably and without competition.
Also I took 15,388 flights around the world in 29 years. That must have helped?
Besides, not all "wild land" is cooler. Sandy grasslands round here are exceedingly hot.
Heathrow will not hold the record for long.