"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
How much scope is there for the BoE to reverse Quantitative Easing (something that rarely seems to get talked about) and what would be the impact. Essentially removing money from the economy by selling the bonds they hold on their balance sheet and then reducing their balance sheet.
After all that was the whole point of QE which was supposed to distinguish it from old fashioned money printing - it could be reversed and the cash injected into the economy could be taken out again.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Following the Mordaunt playbook I see - "No I never said he was an influence. How dare you point to my statement last Thursday saying the opposite. This is a brutal campaign to undermine me. It's not fair to point to things I've said. I am the People's Choice."
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
Having listened to the farm lobby throughout, they were really keen to nobble the possibilities in the trade deal negotiations to make sure that their their lobby interest was reflected in the outcome, rather than the national interest as defined by the elected Government. IMO ditto the charities.
Trying to constrain a negotiation by smuggling bits of restriction into law in advance is not an appropriate way to do that imo. For me that is far too like the process of attaching bits of pork barrel in Congress in the US legal process, where unless XYZ gets their pound of flesh the greater proposal is wrecked.
There was appropriate concern about the Government not setting up their industry consultative group quickly enough - I agree there, and criticised Liz Truss at the time.
The consequence of letting that process operate would be to make trade agreements far more difficult to obtain, which I don't think we need.
To me that this letter is being pushed by Gina Miller's mob says quite a lot.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
You're saying the EU is a turd? What has brought this on?
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation.
Not if the inflation is caused by increases in import costs rather than by domestic capacity pressures, as is clearly the case here (though not in the US). The policy prescriptions for dealing with cost-push rather than demand-pull inflation are very different - see any undergraduate level economics textbook.
And, as others have noted, real interest rates will remain sharply negative for a while under any reasonable scenario, with the associated distortions to the economy that involves.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
The latest borrowing figures and economic for the UK are simply horrific.
In theory this should suit Sunak - who will make long-term solvency decisions - but because he's so well-off and confident about it - and it probably doesn't help that his wife is a non-dom - people simply don't trust him to have their best interests at heart and do enough about it.
Sunak has probably been arguing in cabinet about the dangers of trade war with Europe. Whether he'll be brave enough to say this when backing the DUP is now an article of faith within the Conservative party I don't know.
Rishi Sunak brave lol.
Well the funny thing is if he really is the underdog now he might as well go for it.
Sunak needs something big to turn this around in the next week because it seems the ballots are going out long before the bulk of the hustings.
True but it is in the early hustings that an unprepared Liz Truss is most likely to implode, so it is swings and roundabouts on early ballot returns.
And there's a couple of TV debates coming up I think next week?
BBC1 Monday night is the first; Talk TV on Tuesday. Then the party-organised hustings start.
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
My view is that we are seeing sectarian interests cosplaying as "scrutiny".
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
Robert Tombs is quite right: it's sensationalist nonsense.
The Government of India Act 1919 was passed several years before that drama is set and transferred agriculture, local government, health, and education to provincial councils under local Indians. It only reserved currency, central administration, defence , foreign affairs, and communications to the Viceroy. As the King-Emperor said at the time:
"The Government of India Act of 1833 opened the door for Indians to public office and employment. The Act of 1858 transferred the administration from the Company to the Crown and laid the foundations of public life which exist in India today. The Act of 1861 sowed the seed of representative institutions, and the seed was quickened into life by the Act of 1909. The Act which has now become law entrusts the elected representative of the people with a definite share in the Government and points the way to full responsible Government hereafter".
I repeat: its preamble declared that "the objective of the British Government was the gradual introduction of responsible government in India."
In other words, just like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The story of India is that we consistently did all this about 20-30 years too late, not that we acted as Nazis or proto-Nazis.
To say we did is insulting, inaccurate, sensationalist, misleading and dangerous.
Bad history of yesteryear leads to bad policy in future, and this sort of stuff absolutely needs to be called out - no matter how unfashionable it is to do so.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation.
Not if the inflation is caused by increases in import costs rather than by domestic capacity pressures, as is clearly the case here (though not in the US). The policy prescriptions for dealing with cost-push rather than demand-pull inflation are very different - see any undergraduate level economics textbook.
And, as others have noted, real interest rates will remain sharply negative for a while under any reasonable scenario, with the associated distortions to the economy that involves.
The complication on interest rates is that if everyone else's (especially America's) goes up, that will affect the exchange rate which will impact the price of imports, especially those priced in dollars.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
How much scope is there for the BoE to reverse Quantitative Easing (something that rarely seems to get talked about) and what would be the impact. Essentially removing money from the economy by selling the bonds they hold on their balance sheet and then reducing their balance sheet.
We have one of the weakest and most useless BoE Governors at a time when we need someone effective and strong.
I will leave to @rcs1000 to comment on your specific proposal. Generally, rmoney from the economy will calm down an overheated economy and may well lead to recession. But when there are also demands for help on heating bills, help for the NHS, schools, defence and debt interest to pay etc etc austerity of any kind is not going to be politically palatable.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
There was talk at the start of the year that if things went badly for Putin this could be another 1989 moment. Maybe for the UK too. The climax of the Lawson boom?
Things beginning to look dicey in Kherson Oblast for Russia with the bridge out of action at Kherson city and significant forces encircled in the North of the Oblast.
That encirclement hasn't happened. I posted a link to a tweet debunking it yesterday. People got a bit overexcited about a near encirclement.
Neither that original claim or the debunking were authoritative or persuasive. Either could be correct.
People trying to discern what is going on on the ground at that sort of granularity from open-source maps are essentially reading the entrails of a snake.
The point is not to believe anything until it has been reasonably well corroborated. Ukrainian use of HIMARS to hit Russian ammo dumps - that has been well corroborated, so we can believe that is actually happening. An encirclement in north Kherson - this is not corroborated, given the time that has passed since the claim was made, we would have expected corroboration by now, so we can move this from not proven to not happened (yet).
The maps are created by people who are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. The best of them are open about when they correct prior mistakes, and what sorts of evidence they are using, and so you can have a pretty good sense of how reliable they are.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
How much scope is there for the BoE to reverse Quantitative Easing (something that rarely seems to get talked about) and what would be the impact. Essentially removing money from the economy by selling the bonds they hold on their balance sheet and then reducing their balance sheet.
After all that was the whole point of QE which was supposed to distinguish it from old fashioned money printing - it could be reversed and the cash injected into the economy could be taken out again.
Removing money from the economy at the same time as praying for growth might need a certain subtlety of execution.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
There is no good argument against Parliamentary scrutiny of agreements. Especially not from Brexiteers who wanted to take back control and now seem not to care less about the sidelining of Parliament.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
The transformation of historians into partisan political commentators is not necessarily to their or our advantage.
Partly true. But an occasional appearance of Tacitus or Thucydides commenting on European matters would do a bit to improve the Mail or Torygraph. At least it would be literate, readable and informed
Robert Tombs has, to say the least, proved himself the hard way if you look at his career and bibliography. He may not be Herodotus but he isn't Polly Toynbee either.
Proper historians do one thing differently: they don't simply ignore inconvenient evidence and lie about it.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
I don't agree at all with the criticism of the deal - it shows a net GDP gain with better access for British businesses and services, and provides one of the most liberal deals for young people under 35 that Australia has ever signed - they basically have full free movement up to 3 years. Australia is a growing economy with a growing role in the Indo-Pacific, and a close ally, and it's quite right we strengthen our ties.
I'm not at all worried about the impact on British agriculture; we had free trade with Australia and New Zealand up until 1980 and (guess what!) British farming was fine.
We've also been part of a single agricultural market of over 400m people for the best part of 40 years, exposed to competition right across Europe that's barely 25 miles away, and that didn't collapse British farming either. The only real criticism I can make of it is that it doesn't contain enough clauses on climate change.
Criticism of this falls simply down Brexit lines: if the EU had done a similar deal (and, indeed, they are currently negotiating one) then precisely the same people would be applauding it.
A government that believed in Parliamentary democracy would have allowed MPs to scrutinise the deal before it was signed.
As it happens, I agree - all trade deals should be debated and voted on in the floor of the House of Commons, and I'd be supportive of this.
What I don't agree with, though, is this hyperbolic meme of yours that this government is a threat to the future of democracy in the UK.
You've got high on your own supply.
Once you bypass Parliament and embed power in the executive, as this government is doing, you start on the slippery slope. Combine that with making it harder to vote, removing the Electoral Commission's independence, rewriting the ministerial code, ignoring international law, curtailing judicial review and criminalising peaceful protest, and a pattern begins to emerge.
You can certainly criticise this Government for some of its policy decisions in this space, as do I, and like I criticised the previous administration for 90-day detention without charge, ID cards, supporting extraordinary rendition, signing a illiberal and lopsided extradition treaty to the USA, restricting the right to protest, and centralising policy in "sofa" government, without believing they are on the inevitable path to Ermächtigungsgesetz.
If that statement comes from a Tory MP, they only have themselves to blame. It was always abundantly clear that Sunak was not popular with the members, yet the 'gizzajob' numpties still voted for him, hoping that the engineered alternative would be so unthinkable that people would be forced to vote for the slightly less shit option. That doesn't work. People don't like being manipulated in that way. Basically Tory MP's passed on the good option, Mordaunt (I admit she didn't perform exceptionally in the campaign), now they're reaping what they've sown.
That does not seem to be what happened. Mordaunt was the risky option. MPs voted for the two most senior options available.
The other factor is that a substantial minority of MPs backed Truss because they are as far down the rabbit hole as her, and see her as continuity Johnson, albeit with worse communication skills.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Given that it looks like Sunak is going to lose, I wonder if he should re-think his strategy and make the distinction between him and Truss sharper? At the moment the only clear difference is on tax; on most other metrics (e.g. Channel 4, Brexit, immigration) he seems to be trying to appeal to the same right-wing constituency as Truss. But he can't outflank Truss on the right, and he can't win over the Mail etc. So maybe he should try to rebrand himself as a one-nation Tory Brexiteer? Something like:
"I'm going to maximise the opportunities that Brexit brings. But at the same time, I'm going to bring the nation together and heal the divisiveness of the last six years. No longer shall we be so hostile to great British institutions, or play fast and loose with the rule of law, or hostile to those who oppose our ideas. No longer will I allow our party to be accused of crony capitalism. I am going to repair Britain's deserved reputation as a beacon of fairness, common decency and good judgement, where sound money and a fair tax system are combined to both boost economic growth and deliver world-class public services."
And so on. I'm no Tory of course, but I wonder whether there's a larger constituency among members for a pro-Brexit, one-nation approach than people think.
It'd be nice to think so but most of the people I know who I would class as one-nation Tories have left the party in the past few years.
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
My view is that we are seeing sectarian interests cosplaying as "scrutiny".
In the EU they all need to pass Parliament.
Indeed, I believe the Australian parliament has to agree this deal too.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
I'll disagree there on the mechanism. Supply-side reform, not subsidy, would have been the way.
In practice that would have been altering the formula - we had many months of notice as to what would happen, and temporarily adjusting regulation of the industry as possible.
There might have been an argument for an industry borrowing facility of some kind, perhaps secured with a charge on assets to make sure it was paid back.
The "interest rates to 7%" is sensationalist press BS. No one has said that.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
There is no good argument against Parliamentary scrutiny of agreements. Especially not from Brexiteers who wanted to take back control and now seem not to care less about the sidelining of Parliament.
You don't think they meant any of that?
Except in the narrow sense that ministers planned to take control to themselves. Subject to one vote at a time of their choosing every five years or so.
I can believe Tombs is right on India and wrong on the EU. That's all.
Just as I can think he's an outstanding historian of nineteenth century France who deserves utmost respect on that subject without thinking his views on other matters are any more valid than those of the rest of us.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
There was talk at the start of the year that if things went badly for Putin this could be another 1989 moment. Maybe for the UK too. The climax of the Lawson boom?
Things beginning to look dicey in Kherson Oblast for Russia with the bridge out of action at Kherson city and significant forces encircled in the North of the Oblast.
That encirclement hasn't happened. I posted a link to a tweet debunking it yesterday. People got a bit overexcited about a near encirclement.
Neither that original claim or the debunking were authoritative or persuasive. Either could be correct.
People trying to discern what is going on on the ground at that sort of granularity from open-source maps are essentially reading the entrails of a snake.
Not to mention that the idea of neat, linear frontlines on a map is even more nonsense than it has ever been.
The reality is more like spatters of dots on the map.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
The history of governments directly subsidising fuel or food and interfering with the market using price to balance supply and demand is not promising as far as I am aware of it. The most urgent action taken by the government should have been on the supply side - tackling the problem at its source - with the most vigorous action to increase non-gas supplies of electricity, and to increase gas storage. In the meantime, for those people who are not the poorest, it is useful to have a strong price signal to encourage reasonable economies in use to reduce demand.
One thing Sunak could do to increase his chances is pledge a powerful role, perhaps the 'No. 10 economic growth unit' she wants, to Kemi Badenoch. Members like Kemi, so it's like offering jelly and ice cream for pudding if you're trying to make someone eat liver casserole.
I don't think he will, because it would tie his own hands. Instead, I expect his campaign to trash Truss. Which is a shame.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Following the Mordaunt playbook I see - "No I never said he was an influence. How dare you point to my statement last Thursday saying the opposite. This is a brutal campaign to undermine me. It's not fair to point to things I've said. I am the People's Choice."
Bart was saying how wonderful Minford was yesterday, oh well guess he needs re-programming
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
There was talk at the start of the year that if things went badly for Putin this could be another 1989 moment. Maybe for the UK too. The climax of the Lawson boom?
Things beginning to look dicey in Kherson Oblast for Russia with the bridge out of action at Kherson city and significant forces encircled in the North of the Oblast.
That encirclement hasn't happened. I posted a link to a tweet debunking it yesterday. People got a bit overexcited about a near encirclement.
Neither that original claim or the debunking were authoritative or persuasive. Either could be correct.
People trying to discern what is going on on the ground at that sort of granularity from open-source maps are essentially reading the entrails of a snake.
The point is not to believe anything until it has been reasonably well corroborated. Ukrainian use of HIMARS to hit Russian ammo dumps - that has been well corroborated, so we can believe that is actually happening. An encirclement in north Kherson - this is not corroborated, given the time that has passed since the claim was made, we would have expected corroboration by now, so we can move this from not proven to not happened (yet).
The maps are created by people who are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. The best of them are open about when they correct prior mistakes, and what sorts of evidence they are using, and so you can have a pretty good sense of how reliable they are.
Your cynicism is misplaced.
Yes, they are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. They do a brilliant job.
But such sources are by necessity delayed. They're brilliant for getting a *feel* of the broad frontlines; and the general progress over a period of days and weeks. They're not so good at looking at what's happening *now* down to the granularity of a field.
They're a tool, and like all tools they are limited.
In addition: remember that Ukraine has, at times, specifically asked for information from the southern front *not* to be published.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
Robert Tombs is quite right: it's sensationalist nonsense.
The Government of India Act 1919 was passed several years before that drama is set and transferred agriculture, local government, health, and education to provincial councils under local Indians. It only reserved currency, central administration, defence , foreign affairs, and communications to the Viceroy. As the King-Emperor said at the time:
"The Government of India Act of 1833 opened the door for Indians to public office and employment. The Act of 1858 transferred the administration from the Company to the Crown and laid the foundations of public life which exist in India today. The Act of 1861 sowed the seed of representative institutions, and the seed was quickened into life by the Act of 1909. The Act which has now become law entrusts the elected representative of the people with a definite share in the Government and points the way to full responsible Government hereafter".
I repeat: its preamble declared that "the objective of the British Government was the gradual introduction of responsible government in India."
In other words, just like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The story of India is that we consistently did all this about 20-30 years too late, not that we acted as Nazis or proto-Nazis.
To say we did is insulting, inaccurate, sensationalist, misleading and dangerous.
Bad history of yesteryear leads to bad policy in future, and this sort of stuff absolutely needs to be called out - no matter how unfashionable it is to do so.
The rule of the East India Company, before power transferred to the Crown, is more problematic (and is why the Crown took over). It was also a long time before the film is set, of course.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
I'll disagree there on the mechanism. Supply-side reform, not subsidy, would have been the way.
In practice that would have been altering the formula - we had many months of notice as to what would happen, and temporarily adjusting regulation of the industry as possible.
There might have been an argument for an industry borrowing facility of some kind, perhaps secured with a charge on assets to make sure it was paid back.
The "interest rates to 7%" is sensationalist press BS. No one has said that.
I suspect (and hope) you are right about 7% - I shouldn't have mentioned that.
As regards to subsidy: for fuel tax it would be about a reduction of a negative subsidy (fuel tax). For domestic gas and electricity it would entail changing the price cap formula for sure but the gap between the cap and open market prices would have to paid for somehow, I don't care what you call that.
I can believe Tombs is right on India and wrong on the EU. That's all.
Just as I can think he's an outstanding historian of nineteenth century France who deserves utmost respect on that subject without thinking his views on other matters are any more valid than those of the rest of us.
The arguments of decent historians in the liberal tradition are worth considering carefully just because, like say philosophers or physicists, their discipline does not permit them to ignore evidence, take no account of the weaknesses in their argument, hide data, ignore cause and effect or jump to conclusions formed on instant opinion.
None of that makes them right of course. Otherwise truth and infallibility would be available to us fairly readily and we would be lost in dull agreement. Thankfully no chance of that.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
There was talk at the start of the year that if things went badly for Putin this could be another 1989 moment. Maybe for the UK too. The climax of the Lawson boom?
Things beginning to look dicey in Kherson Oblast for Russia with the bridge out of action at Kherson city and significant forces encircled in the North of the Oblast.
That encirclement hasn't happened. I posted a link to a tweet debunking it yesterday. People got a bit overexcited about a near encirclement.
Neither that original claim or the debunking were authoritative or persuasive. Either could be correct.
People trying to discern what is going on on the ground at that sort of granularity from open-source maps are essentially reading the entrails of a snake.
Not to mention that the idea of neat, linear frontlines on a map is even more nonsense than it has ever been.
The reality is more like spatters of dots on the map.
I don't think that's true. The fundamental essence of war is supply, the same as it has been for some centuries. If you cannot supply your troops then they cannot continue to fight.
The linear frontlines on a map do a decent job of indicating where each side can supply their troops, or where they can completely interdict supplies from the enemy to its troops. It's the connections between the spatters of dots on the map that count, and that enables you to draw an indication of where the front line is.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
There was talk at the start of the year that if things went badly for Putin this could be another 1989 moment. Maybe for the UK too. The climax of the Lawson boom?
Things beginning to look dicey in Kherson Oblast for Russia with the bridge out of action at Kherson city and significant forces encircled in the North of the Oblast.
That encirclement hasn't happened. I posted a link to a tweet debunking it yesterday. People got a bit overexcited about a near encirclement.
Neither that original claim or the debunking were authoritative or persuasive. Either could be correct.
People trying to discern what is going on on the ground at that sort of granularity from open-source maps are essentially reading the entrails of a snake.
The point is not to believe anything until it has been reasonably well corroborated. Ukrainian use of HIMARS to hit Russian ammo dumps - that has been well corroborated, so we can believe that is actually happening. An encirclement in north Kherson - this is not corroborated, given the time that has passed since the claim was made, we would have expected corroboration by now, so we can move this from not proven to not happened (yet).
The maps are created by people who are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. The best of them are open about when they correct prior mistakes, and what sorts of evidence they are using, and so you can have a pretty good sense of how reliable they are.
Your cynicism is misplaced.
Yes, they are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. They do a brilliant job.
But such sources are by necessity delayed. They're brilliant for getting a *feel* of the broad frontlines; and the general progress over a period of days and weeks. They're not so good at looking at what's happening *now* down to the granularity of a field.
They're a tool, and like all tools they are limited.
In addition: remember that Ukraine has, at times, specifically asked for information from the southern front *not* to be published.
Yes, they're a tool with limits, as I have indicated, but they're a damn sight more useful than, "...essentially reading the entrails of a snake."
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
Indeed, that sounds very much like what Mordaunt was proposing.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
There is no good argument against Parliamentary scrutiny of agreements. Especially not from Brexiteers who wanted to take back control and now seem not to care less about the sidelining of Parliament.
Interestingly, there is an article in the Telegraph this morning about "Bringing Boris Back" and Tory members signing up to a petition, mumblings of MPs behaving in an unaccountable fashion and members needing to take back control of the Party.
It sounds like EU Commission bashing all over again, just closer to home. Are these people never happy without an enemy to shoot at?
Blake Lemoine: Google fires engineer who said AI tech has feelings
Sorry Leon has been sacked
Is there any evidence that it doesn't?
The only physical object we know from within does have feelings (in most cases), so what renders other physical objects immune when configured in sufficiently complex ways?
This is surely physicalism's most interesting question. It's a very bad idea to jump to one sided conclusions.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Suppose he has to dumb down to get himself in the Tele and the Speccie.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Lol - I actually meant HYUFD must be getting itchy feet and rethinking his support for Sunak over Truss, not that he might leave the party! If the polls are saying she’ll do better with the public...
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Every word of that is true. There are a plethora of Remainers on this site who want to bash everything Britain does while dismissing anything that EU politicians do wrong.
There are some on this site who get so angry at anyone who has a negative word to say even about, say, German politicians soft on Russiaz that they start ranting and raving about the Express instead.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Following the Mordaunt playbook I see - "No I never said he was an influence. How dare you point to my statement last Thursday saying the opposite. This is a brutal campaign to undermine me. It's not fair to point to things I've said. I am the People's Choice."
Bart was saying how wonderful Minford was yesterday, oh well guess he needs re-programming
What a complete re-programme new name the lot or just an upgrade? It's only 12 months since he was decommissioned after the last malfunction. The one where he declared Boris Johnson the best Prime Minister since the war.
I must admit I thought at the time it was unfixable. But apparently it was just a glitch.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
There was talk at the start of the year that if things went badly for Putin this could be another 1989 moment. Maybe for the UK too. The climax of the Lawson boom?
Things beginning to look dicey in Kherson Oblast for Russia with the bridge out of action at Kherson city and significant forces encircled in the North of the Oblast.
That encirclement hasn't happened. I posted a link to a tweet debunking it yesterday. People got a bit overexcited about a near encirclement.
Neither that original claim or the debunking were authoritative or persuasive. Either could be correct.
People trying to discern what is going on on the ground at that sort of granularity from open-source maps are essentially reading the entrails of a snake.
The point is not to believe anything until it has been reasonably well corroborated. Ukrainian use of HIMARS to hit Russian ammo dumps - that has been well corroborated, so we can believe that is actually happening. An encirclement in north Kherson - this is not corroborated, given the time that has passed since the claim was made, we would have expected corroboration by now, so we can move this from not proven to not happened (yet).
The maps are created by people who are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. The best of them are open about when they correct prior mistakes, and what sorts of evidence they are using, and so you can have a pretty good sense of how reliable they are.
Your cynicism is misplaced.
Yes, they are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. They do a brilliant job.
But such sources are by necessity delayed. They're brilliant for getting a *feel* of the broad frontlines; and the general progress over a period of days and weeks. They're not so good at looking at what's happening *now* down to the granularity of a field.
They're a tool, and like all tools they are limited.
In addition: remember that Ukraine has, at times, specifically asked for information from the southern front *not* to be published.
Yes, they're a tool with limits, as I have indicated, but they're a damn sight more useful than, "...essentially reading the entrails of a snake."
That is the cynicism that I objected to.
The cynicism is fully correct if you read what I wrote. These maps are great for seeing the broad picture; for the narrow picture they will be fairly unreliable. My comment mentioned: "at that sort of granularity "
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Every word of that is true. There are a plethora of Remainers on this site who want to bash everything Britain does while dismissing anything that EU politicians do wrong.
There are some on this site who get so angry at anyone who has a negative word to say even about, say, German politicians soft on Russiaz that they start ranting and raving about the Express instead.
I think you're exaggerating.
I don't think anyone here except like two people actually want to rejoin the EU. I certainly don't.
I do not think pointing out that Brexit has issues is any more problematic than you spent presumably thirty years telling us what was going wrong with remaining.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
It’s no different from any other party supporter of any party over time.
There will be leaders of your party you aren’t keen on but you still believe that in the round they will deliver better than another party or not enact things that the other parties would which you object to.
All parties are coalitions so never likely to have a leader all supporters approve of.
So nice try with the dig at Tories but it’s not as clever as you think.
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
My view is that we are seeing sectarian interests cosplaying as "scrutiny".
In the EU they all need to pass Parliament.
Indeed, I believe the Australian parliament has to agree this deal too.
There's a difference between Parliamentary contribution to content in advance, an advanced Parliamentary veto of "XYZ can't be included" tying the hands of the negotiators behind their backs, and a go/no-go decision afterwards (as happens for secondary legislation) with consultation beforehand.
The list of EU negotiations which have gone nowhere, sometimes for decades, does not to me recommend their model.
(TBF the Brobdingnagian complexity of the EU setup, and the bizarre self-regard of the organisation, does not help.)
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
No conundrum for HYUFD. In about a fortnight Sunak has gone from a hated traitor who has no chance, to the person to vote for.
If it's Truss who gets the job then she will be the best person, clearly.
(Savanta ComRes; 15-17 July; 1,980; all the usual sub-sample provisos apply, especially lack of correct weighting which only YouGov applies to geographical sub-samples)
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
Indeed, that sounds very much like what Mordaunt was proposing.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
I think, though, that you are always Labour? And nothing wrong with that.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
I think, though, that you are always Labour? And nothing wrong with that.
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
My view is that we are seeing sectarian interests cosplaying as "scrutiny".
In the EU they all need to pass Parliament.
Indeed, I believe the Australian parliament has to agree this deal too.
There's a difference between Parliamentary contribution to content in advance, a Parliamentary veto on XYZ can't be included, and a go/no-go decision afterwards (as happens for secondary legislation) with consultation beforehand.
The list of EU negotiations which have gone nowhere, sometimes for decades, does not to me recommend their model.
Why do Australian MPs get to debate the deal and our MPs not?
The Tories do have a massive majority, and could whip it if needed. They just wanted to avoid scrutiny.
As I pointed out before, it was a factor in handing Tiverton and Honiton to the LDs. Riding roughshod over core voters concerns because they have nowhere else to go is not a great long term strategy.
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
I think, though, that you are always Labour? And nothing wrong with that.
No I've voted Tory - and Lib Dem.
So, if it’s not too personal, when did you vote Tory and why?
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
I think, though, that you are always Labour? And nothing wrong with that.
No I've voted Tory - and Lib Dem.
So, if it’s not too personal, when did you vote Tory and why?
Because I thought Labour had run out of ideas and needed to spend some time in opposition post Iraq
It's a rubbish deal which her own officials warned her against. The only thing it delivered was yet another photo opportunity for her.
Look at the signatories to the letter - farmers who want to keep competition out and woke charities that hate free trade.
If anything I think the deal did not go nearly far enough in giving British consumers the benefits of cheaper food for decades.
Look at the substance of the letter. It is about the refusal to allow any Parliamentary scrutiny of the deal. Those who moaned endlessly about the lack of scrutiny of what the EU was up to, its high handedness, its bypassing of democratically elected Parliaments now say nothing - applaud even - when the British executive does exactly the same thing and shows utter contempt for Parliament, for MPs and for voters.
A lack of transparency leads to bad governance.
I think a further question is whether it is usual for Parliament to get involved in the negotiation of trade agreements beyond go/no go.
My view is that we are seeing sectarian interests cosplaying as "scrutiny".
In the EU they all need to pass Parliament.
Indeed, I believe the Australian parliament has to agree this deal too.
There's a difference between Parliamentary contribution to content in advance, a Parliamentary veto on XYZ can't be included, and a go/no-go decision afterwards (as happens for secondary legislation) with consultation beforehand.
The list of EU negotiations which have gone nowhere, sometimes for decades, does not to me recommend their model.
Why do Australian MPs get to debate the deal and our MPs not?
The Tories do have a massive majority, and could whip it if needed. They just wanted to avoid scrutiny.
As I pointed out before, it was a factor in handing Tiverton and Honiton to the LDs. Riding roughshod over core voters concerns because they have nowhere else to go is not a great long term strategy.
One hopes that future administrations return to better standards. Parliamentary scrutiny might be annoying for ministers, but is essential. As is not lying to the house.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
Indeed, that sounds very much like what Mordaunt was proposing.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
Thank you for that. Perhaps we could send that article to a noted historian of 19th Century France?
I think this paragraph encapsulates why Sunak will lose:
"Truss’s persona is different. The trace of Yorkshire in the accent, the Thatcher cosplay, coupled with her disavowals of her earlier position – she says she was flat “wrong” to back remain – mean she now has a Brexity vibe. Especially when set against Sunak, who, with his non-dom wife and US green card, could have been one of the very “citizens of nowhere” Theresa May had in mind when she uttered that poisonous phrase."
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Following the Mordaunt playbook I see - "No I never said he was an influence. How dare you point to my statement last Thursday saying the opposite. This is a brutal campaign to undermine me. It's not fair to point to things I've said. I am the People's Choice."
Bart was saying how wonderful Minford was yesterday, oh well guess he needs re-programming
No, Minford is great, he thinks for himself and doesn't fall into herding of 364 economists can't be wrong variety. I respect that. 👍
Everything he says should be taken with a pinch of salt of course, but that applies to literally everyone on the planet. No human is infallible.
To believe anything Minford says just because he said it is the same fallacy as believing anything the herd says just because they said it.
As it happens, I think Minford is right on this issue. In what he actually said, not how some on the media are spinning it.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
To be slightly fair you are quoting presumably a sub editor's summary of the piece. On the other hand it is a pretty accurate summary.
What a strange conversation this is. OK this guy seems to be an historian, but it is usual to judge the output of historians on merit, not by the emeritusness or Palme holding status of the author. Anyway this isn't history it is (bad) journalism, so his talent for history is about as relevant as his talent for cake baking.
Good to see the moral excellence of the Raj reaffirmed though. My word, those silly billies got the wrong end of the stick in 1857.
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
Indeed, that sounds very much like what Mordaunt was proposing.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
A sub-optimal article from a generally decent writer. Yes, he is right about the delusions of the Tory membership. But wrong in the implication that in choosing Brexit we chose wrong over right. We chose (just) one choice between two neither of which were acceptable to the UK population as a whole.
Perhaps Freedland should have a word with Larry Elliott, the Guardian economics editor.
The Guardianista case against the EU is overwhelming. What is there to like about an sub-democratic, power grabbing, plutocratic bankers protectionist club of the western rich, with a highly paid Potemkin parliament, designed to help third world farmers become poorer while letting others pay for your defence?
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
Indeed, that sounds very much like what Mordaunt was proposing.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
Thank you for that. Perhaps we could send that article to a noted historian of 19th Century France?
I think this paragraph encapsulates why Sunak will lose:
"Truss’s persona is different. The trace of Yorkshire in the accent, the Thatcher cosplay, coupled with her disavowals of her earlier position – she says she was flat “wrong” to back remain – mean she now has a Brexity vibe. Especially when set against Sunak, who, with his non-dom wife and US green card, could have been one of the very “citizens of nowhere” Theresa May had in mind when she uttered that poisonous phrase."
"Liz Truss’s team is frantically distancing themselves from her economics guru tonight after he said her tax cuts could result in interest rates of up to 7 per cent.
Professor Patrick Minford, who was named by the Tory leadership frontrunner as endorsing her fiscal strategy, said higher rates would be a “good thing” and more expensive mortgages would be “part of the adjustment”.
However, several mortgage experts warned this would lead to further annual payments on the average mortgage of about £700 a month, crippling household finances.
Former chancellor Norman Lamont also told i it would not be a “good thing” to see interest rates go as high as 7 per cent and said it would be “interesting” to see if Truss agreed with the claims.
The Truss campaign was trying to distance themselves from Professor Minford last night, saying he had no “official role” with her campaign – despite the Foreign Secretary citing his influence as recently as Thursday."
Let me guess: neither of them have mortgages, but do have savings?
The claim "to bring 7% interest rates" is a gormless, dishonest exaggeration of what was actually said by Minford.
But then we all know that.
But then it is playbook for the UK media shitshow - take an extreme case, get somebody to say "*this* would cause *that*", and try and hang it around the neck of the person who didn't say it in the first place.
There is a reason they are generally contemptible.
Pumping money into an economy already suffering from inflation is likely to lead to more inflation. And the ways to deal with that include cutting spending and raising interest rates. Since La Truss says she is not going to do the former, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the latter will happen and will be a direct consequence of her economic plan, a plan which seems to resemble the Barber boom of the early 1970's rather than anything more Thatcherite.
Even a small rise in interest rates will cause problems, especially on top of rising fuel bills.
The overwhelming driver of inflation is the cost of fuel. The government should have seen that as it started and stepped in to temporarily control the domestic price of energy and cut fuel duty, subsidising through borrowing as necessary.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
Indeed, that sounds very much like what Mordaunt was proposing.
(To quibble, the author I think confuses ‘effect’ with ‘affect’.)
Its pretty obvious to me that most politics is tribalism that has a psuedo religious twist to it. But not that many people get caught up in it. For instance none of my neighbours show any tribalism at all. One young family are very green, but don't believe in electric cars. My old university friends by contrast think that they are sophisticated and knowledgeable on things like climate change, but actually they are sharing misinformation and propoganda with each other a lot of the time. Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
Thank you for that. Perhaps we could send that article to a noted historian of 19th Century France?
I think this paragraph encapsulates why Sunak will lose:
"Truss’s persona is different. The trace of Yorkshire in the accent, the Thatcher cosplay, coupled with her disavowals of her earlier position – she says she was flat “wrong” to back remain – mean she now has a Brexity vibe. Especially when set against Sunak, who, with his non-dom wife and US green card, could have been one of the very “citizens of nowhere” Theresa May had in mind when she uttered that poisonous phrase."
There is a "trace of Yorkshire* in her accent? Sorry, I can't detect one.
Is it not obvious that the reason that Patrick Minford was able to say that a fiscal boost from cutting taxes was not inflationary was because he was adjusting monetary policy to tighten the money supply sufficiently to offset the tax cuts? Liz, not understanding that, has focused on the fiscal element without appreciating that there has to be a monetary response.
Would we be better off with lower taxes but higher interest rates? Well, that very much depends who you are. Those who have largely paid off or inflated away their mortgages would undoubtedly be. Those who haven't would be catastrophically hit. There are enough of the latter to undermine the housing market so even those without the mortgage would see a reduction in their major asset.
From an economic point of view Minford thinks that is a good thing. He identifies the asset inflation caused by extremely low interest rates over the last 14 years as part of the problem, sharply increasing inequality in society, reducing job mobility and discouraging investment in useful productive assets rather than houses. I have some considerable sympathy with these points but the challenge is how you get from here to there without bankrupting half the country and it isn't easy.
Rishi is completely at home in this territory and should be able to rip Truss a new one on Monday. If her plan is thought to be falling apart he would be back in the game. Given when the voting occurs he only has one chance. There are likely to be fireworks.
Mr. B, the complacency of Labour when it came to long term matters was phenomenal. Inheriting a boom, they ran a deficit. They imposed political divisions permanently with the creation of devolved political bodies for everywhere that wasn't England (and then tried to slice England into pieces).
Labour, but also other parties, were as bad or worse on the EU. Giving away vetoes, and rebates, promising and reneging upon a referendum. Similarly, all parties have been very poor on energy policy, and defence.
Long term planning has been abysmal here. Partly that's down to the media fixation on bad news, short termism, and personalities over policies.
I concur. The asymmetrical nature of devolution is one of its key weaknesses. Leaving aside the glaring gap called England, you have oddities like the principal that in Scotland everything is devolved unless it is explicitly Reserved by statute, whereas in Wales everything is Reserved unless it is explicitly devolved by statute. There are many other inconsistencies.
The attempt to chop up England was one of the biggest disgraces and flops of the Blair years.
However, one correction! The LibLab devolution scheme did *not* “impose political divisions”: those divisions were already there, and had been there throughout the entire life of the Union. Scotland already had administrative devolution in the period 1707-1999; what the Scotland Act did was introduce direct democratic accountability for Scottish civil service departments.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Every word of that is true. There are a plethora of Remainers on this site who want to bash everything Britain does while dismissing anything that EU politicians do wrong.
There are some on this site who get so angry at anyone who has a negative word to say even about, say, German politicians soft on Russiaz that they start ranting and raving about the Express instead.
I think you're exaggerating.
I don't think anyone here except like two people actually want to rejoin the EU. I certainly don't.
I do not think pointing out that Brexit has issues is any more problematic than you spent presumably thirty years telling us what was going wrong with remaining.
They differ slightly in how they want to rejoin, some accept the need for a slow political process, some would do it by diktat on day 1 of a Labour govt, but all would rejoin tomorrow if a wand could be waved
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
I think, though, that you are always Labour? And nothing wrong with that.
No I've voted Tory - and Lib Dem.
So, if it’s not too personal, when did you vote Tory and why?
Because I thought Labour had run out of ideas and needed to spend some time in opposition post Iraq
Getting rid of Boris (All voters): Right 60 Mistake 27
Getting rid of Boris (Con voters only): Right 43 Mistake 49
Overwhelming support for Net Zero amongst All voters and Con voters.
Tories also do slightly better under Truss than Sunak, getting 38% with the latter and 36% with the former
You must be getting itchy feet!
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
I genuinely feel for @HYUFD. It's going to be a conundrum for him working out how to support a Truss-led Tory party.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Oh, they will find their reasons. It's tribalism.
Correct. They'll be telling us how great Truss is in a few weeks.
Glass houses though horse. You were all for Corbyn, and now laud Starmer. There is nothing wrong with tribalism.
But I have in hindsight said how crap Corbyn was and how I was wrong - I do not see any similar level of admission from these folks.
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
I think, though, that you are always Labour? And nothing wrong with that.
No I've voted Tory - and Lib Dem.
So, if it’s not too personal, when did you vote Tory and why?
Because I thought Labour had run out of ideas and needed to spend some time in opposition post Iraq
I voted Conservative in 2010, for similar reasons, but also believed that Cameron had in large part modernised what had indeed been the nasty party.
Once Cameron fell, that nastiness has recurred far worse. I cannot see myself voting Conservative again in the foreseeable future.
"I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austro-Hungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic."
It never occurs to nationalists like Tombs that many of those opposing the government's disastrous approach to Brexit do so because they care deeply about the UK and its future.
Robert Tombs is a professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is also the recipient of the Ordre des Palmes académiques awarded by the French government. He is a respected and revered academic at the highest level, and a very intelligent man.
You may not agree with his views on the EU but he's a remarkably well-read and well-informed individual, and makes his arguments reasonably, proportionately and lucidly.
You are entirely unqualified to denigrate him with such smears.
No, I just do not share your opinion of him. I do not believe that thinking the government has handled Brexit disastrously equates to bashing, let alone hating, the UK. Equating the government to the country is nationalism.
He has done neither of those things.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Maybe it's just that I can read ...
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
To be slightly fair you are quoting presumably a sub editor's summary of the piece. On the other hand it is a pretty accurate summary.
What a strange conversation this is. OK this guy seems to be an historian, but it is usual to judge the output of historians on merit, not by the emeritusness or Palme holding status of the author. Anyway this isn't history it is (bad) journalism, so his talent for history is about as relevant as his talent for cake baking.
Good to see the moral excellence of the Raj reaffirmed though. My word, those silly billies got the wrong end of the stick in 1857.
He may be a great historian of 19th Century France, but all his source material is laid out, well documented and can be studied for as long as it takes. You could spend your lifetime on it and know everything of significance about it.
But that does not mean that you can use it to define 21st Century Britain, or even 21st Century France.
Now the unfunded tax cuts have had their drawbacks pointed out, I see we have moved to the red tape bonfire stage.
Don't forget savage cuts to the faceless bureaucrats in the Civil Service. And deporting millions of Equality and Diversity jobsworths to Rwanda or something. Billions to be saved through those two measures.
Is it not obvious that the reason that Patrick Minford was able to say that a fiscal boost from cutting taxes was not inflationary was because he was adjusting monetary policy to tighten the money supply sufficiently to offset the tax cuts? Liz, not understanding that, has focused on the fiscal element without appreciating that there has to be a monetary response.
Would we be better off with lower taxes but higher interest rates? Well, that very much depends who you are. Those who have largely paid off or inflated away their mortgages would undoubtedly be. Those who haven't would be catastrophically hit. There are enough of the latter to undermine the housing market so even those without the mortgage would see a reduction in their major asset.
From an economic point of view Minford thinks that is a good thing. He identifies the asset inflation caused by extremely low interest rates over the last 14 years as part of the problem, sharply increasing inequality in society, reducing job mobility and discouraging investment in useful productive assets rather than houses. I have some considerable sympathy with these points but the challenge is how you get from here to there without bankrupting half the country and it isn't easy.
Rishi is completely at home in this territory and should be able to rip Truss a new one on Monday. If her plan is thought to be falling apart he would be back in the game. Given when the voting occurs he only has one chance. There are likely to be fireworks.
The problem is that the membership are not interested in what Thatcher called "sound money" they just want their tax cuts for the rich and a bit of Brussels bashing. As @Cyclefree pointed out, very much like the Barber Boom, which led to Britain's highest ever inflation rate, and a Labour government.
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After all that was the whole point of QE which was supposed to distinguish it from old fashioned money printing - it could be reversed and the cash injected into the economy could be taken out again.
Trying to constrain a negotiation by smuggling bits of restriction into law in advance is not an appropriate way to do that imo. For me that is far too like the process of attaching bits of pork barrel in Congress in the US legal process, where unless XYZ gets their pound of flesh the greater proposal is wrecked.
There was appropriate concern about the Government not setting up their industry consultative group quickly enough - I agree there, and criticised Liz Truss at the time.
The consequence of letting that process operate would be to make trade agreements far more difficult to obtain, which I don't think we need.
To me that this letter is being pushed by Gina Miller's mob says quite a lot.
And, as others have noted, real interest rates will remain sharply negative for a while under any reasonable scenario, with the associated distortions to the economy that involves.
RedfieldWilton has 33% preferring Sunak v Starmer, 34% Truss v Starmer as PM.
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1550595542106898434?s=20&t=6XYdjQyUpYea5RIhYYcP2Q
Techne has 33% of all voters backing both Truss and Sunak as PM but Truss doing better with all voters
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1550581164766797826?s=20&t=6XYdjQyUpYea5RIhYYcP2Q
My view is that we are seeing sectarian interests cosplaying as "scrutiny".
I suspect the public polling on Sunak vs Truss is based on thinking they know about the former (extremely rich, tax issues, responsible for current economy etc) but knowing virtually nothing about Truss.
The Government of India Act 1919 was passed several years before that drama is set and transferred agriculture, local government, health, and education to provincial councils under local Indians. It only reserved currency, central administration, defence , foreign affairs, and communications to the Viceroy. As the King-Emperor said at the time:
"The Government of India Act of 1833 opened the door for Indians to public office and employment. The Act of 1858 transferred the administration from the Company to the Crown and laid the foundations of public life which exist in India today. The Act of 1861 sowed the seed of representative institutions, and the seed was quickened into life by the Act of 1909. The Act which has now become law entrusts the elected representative of the people with a definite share in the Government and points the way to full responsible Government hereafter".
I repeat: its preamble declared that "the objective of the British Government was the gradual introduction of responsible government in India."
In other words, just like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The story of India is that we consistently did all this about 20-30 years too late, not that we acted as Nazis or proto-Nazis.
To say we did is insulting, inaccurate, sensationalist, misleading and dangerous.
Bad history of yesteryear leads to bad policy in future, and this sort of stuff absolutely needs to be called out - no matter how unfashionable it is to do so.
Now instead it is lumbered with huge one-off inflation hikes to state pensions and other benefits, a slew of big pay claims and the industrial disputes that will accompany them, a possible 'can't pay - won't pay' campaign against home energy costs, motors fuel protests, interest rates rising to 7% that will sink many mortgage-payers, lead to a swathe of repossessions and drive up inflation further.
It's heartbreaking really.
I will leave to @rcs1000 to comment on your specific proposal. Generally, rmoney from the economy will calm down an overheated economy and may well lead to recession. But when there are also demands for help on heating bills, help for the NHS, schools, defence and debt interest to pay etc etc austerity of any kind is not going to be politically palatable.
The maps are created by people who are looking at, and aggregating, large amounts of data and information from a variety of sources. The best of them are open about when they correct prior mistakes, and what sorts of evidence they are using, and so you can have a pretty good sense of how reliable they are.
Your cynicism is misplaced.
You are criticising your own caricature of him, not the reality. Probably because the reality is too complex for you to deal with.
Robert Tombs has, to say the least, proved himself the hard way if you look at his career and bibliography. He may not be Herodotus but he isn't Polly Toynbee either.
Proper historians do one thing differently: they don't simply ignore inconvenient evidence and lie about it.
Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU's flaws
Their obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Indeed, I believe the Australian parliament has to agree this deal too.
In practice that would have been altering the formula - we had many months of notice as to what would happen, and temporarily adjusting regulation of the industry as possible.
There might have been an argument for an industry borrowing facility of some kind, perhaps secured with a charge on assets to make sure it was paid back.
The "interest rates to 7%" is sensationalist press BS. No one has said that.
Except in the narrow sense that ministers planned to take control to themselves. Subject to one vote at a time of their choosing every five years or so.
The reality is more like spatters of dots on the map.
I don't think he will, because it would tie his own hands. Instead, I expect his campaign to trash Truss. Which is a shame.
Ultimately there is some fulfillment and satisfaction in just being able to think for yourself and not join any tribe.
But such sources are by necessity delayed. They're brilliant for getting a *feel* of the broad frontlines; and the general progress over a period of days and weeks. They're not so good at looking at what's happening *now* down to the granularity of a field.
They're a tool, and like all tools they are limited.
In addition: remember that Ukraine has, at times, specifically asked for information from the southern front *not* to be published.
Blake Lemoine: Google fires engineer who said AI tech has feelings
Sorry Leon has been sacked
As regards to subsidy: for fuel tax it would be about a reduction of a negative subsidy (fuel tax). For domestic gas and electricity it would entail changing the price cap formula for sure but the gap between the cap and open market prices would have to paid for somehow, I don't care what you call that.
None of that makes them right of course. Otherwise truth and infallibility would be available to us fairly readily and we would be lost in dull agreement. Thankfully no chance of that.
The linear frontlines on a map do a decent job of indicating where each side can supply their troops, or where they can completely interdict supplies from the enemy to its troops. It's the connections between the spatters of dots on the map that count, and that enables you to draw an indication of where the front line is.
Look even in 1999 red lights didn't exist for cyclists
Seems to have been a fatal error to allow Truss to frame the race as they say.
That is the cynicism that I objected to.
Similarly Big_G and a few other Tory-loyalist-Truss-haters on here.
I suspect 'at least they're not Labour' will figure highly in their explanations.
Every candidate and their dog was trumpeting their tax cuts while she was still grounded in Indonesia.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/22/brexit-liz-truss-delusion-rishi-sunak-tory-members
It sounds like EU Commission bashing all over again, just closer to home. Are these people never happy without an enemy to shoot at?
The only physical object we know from within does have feelings (in most cases), so what renders other physical objects immune when configured in sufficiently complex ways?
This is surely physicalism's most interesting question. It's a very bad idea to jump to one sided conclusions.
There are some on this site who get so angry at anyone who has a negative word to say even about, say, German politicians soft on Russiaz that they start ranting and raving about the Express instead.
I must admit I thought at the time it was unfixable. But apparently it was just a glitch.
I don't think anyone here except like two people actually want to rejoin the EU. I certainly don't.
I do not think pointing out that Brexit has issues is any more problematic than you spent presumably thirty years telling us what was going wrong with remaining.
There will be leaders of your party you aren’t keen on but you still believe that in the round they will deliver better than another party or not enact things that the other parties would which you object to.
All parties are coalitions so never likely to have a leader all supporters approve of.
So nice try with the dig at Tories but it’s not as clever as you think.
The list of EU negotiations which have gone nowhere, sometimes for decades, does not to me recommend their model.
(TBF the Brobdingnagian complexity of the EU setup, and the bizarre self-regard of the organisation, does not help.)
If it's Truss who gets the job then she will be the best person, clearly.
We are always at war with Eastasia.
England:
Lab 46%
Con 33%
LD 13%
Grn 4%
Ref 3%
Scotland:
SNP 40%
SLab 33%
SCon 11%
SLD 9%
Grn 4%
Ref 2%
oth 1%
Wales:
WLab 35%
WCon 34%
PC 16%
Ref 6%
WLD 5%
Grn 1%
oth 2%
(Savanta ComRes; 15-17 July; 1,980; all the usual sub-sample provisos apply, especially lack of correct weighting which only YouGov applies to geographical sub-samples)
As for Starmer, he needs to come up with some policies soon or he needs to go.
I voted for David M, I am not an always leftie in the Labour Party.
If Wes would like to pop his hat in the ring, I'd be happy for him to take over.
The Tories do have a massive majority, and could whip it if needed. They just wanted to avoid scrutiny.
As I pointed out before, it was a factor in handing Tiverton and Honiton to the LDs. Riding roughshod over core voters concerns because they have nowhere else to go is not a great long term strategy.
Bye!
"Truss’s persona is different. The trace of Yorkshire in the accent, the Thatcher cosplay, coupled with her disavowals of her earlier position – she says she was flat “wrong” to back remain – mean she now has a Brexity vibe. Especially when set against Sunak, who, with his non-dom wife and US green card, could have been one of the very “citizens of nowhere” Theresa May had in mind when she uttered that poisonous phrase."
Everything he says should be taken with a pinch of salt of course, but that applies to literally everyone on the planet. No human is infallible.
To believe anything Minford says just because he said it is the same fallacy as believing anything the herd says just because they said it.
As it happens, I think Minford is right on this issue. In what he actually said, not how some on the media are spinning it.
What a strange conversation this is. OK this guy seems to be an historian, but it is usual to judge the output of historians on merit, not by the emeritusness or Palme holding status of the author. Anyway this isn't history it is (bad) journalism, so his talent for history is about as relevant as his talent for cake baking.
Good to see the moral excellence of the Raj reaffirmed though. My word, those silly billies got the wrong end of the stick in 1857.
Perhaps Freedland should have a word with Larry Elliott, the Guardian economics editor.
The Guardianista case against the EU is overwhelming. What is there to like about an sub-democratic, power grabbing, plutocratic bankers protectionist club of the western rich, with a highly paid Potemkin parliament, designed to help third world farmers become poorer while letting others pay for your defence?
Sorry, I can't detect one.
Would we be better off with lower taxes but higher interest rates? Well, that very much depends who you are. Those who have largely paid off or inflated away their mortgages would undoubtedly be. Those who haven't would be catastrophically hit. There are enough of the latter to undermine the housing market so even those without the mortgage would see a reduction in their major asset.
From an economic point of view Minford thinks that is a good thing. He identifies the asset inflation caused by extremely low interest rates over the last 14 years as part of the problem, sharply increasing inequality in society, reducing job mobility and discouraging investment in useful productive assets rather than houses. I have some considerable sympathy with these points but the challenge is how you get from here to there without bankrupting half the country and it isn't easy.
Rishi is completely at home in this territory and should be able to rip Truss a new one on Monday. If her plan is thought to be falling apart he would be back in the game. Given when the voting occurs he only has one chance. There are likely to be fireworks.
The attempt to chop up England was one of the biggest disgraces and flops of the Blair years.
However, one correction! The LibLab devolution scheme did *not* “impose political divisions”: those divisions were already there, and had been there throughout the entire life of the Union. Scotland already had administrative devolution in the period 1707-1999; what the Scotland Act did was introduce direct democratic accountability for Scottish civil service departments.
PB-ers who would rejoin the EU
@Roger
@Beibheirli_C
@Benpointer
@RochdalePioneers
@Scott_P
@Nigel_Foremain
@Foxy
@Dura_Ace
@Theuniondivvie
And many more
They differ slightly in how they want to rejoin, some accept the need for a slow political process, some would do it by diktat on day 1 of a Labour govt, but all would rejoin tomorrow if a wand could be waved
Once Cameron fell, that nastiness has recurred far worse. I cannot see myself voting Conservative again in the foreseeable future.
I try to leave plenty of space for your copious analysis that strangely always ends up concluding that Labour are doing well.
France 1.83
Draw 3.8
Netherlands 4.9
This promises to be a cracker.
But that does not mean that you can use it to define 21st Century Britain, or even 21st Century France.
Billions to be saved through those two measures.