Maths at post 16 is bullshit for two very good reasons (1) there aren't enough teachers to teach it and (2) even if they did A-level maths is totally irrelevant to the job market of technical skills he's talking about, so it would require a new qualification. That takes five years to bring in.
Moreover, he just doesn't appreciate how much some children really hate maths. Getting them to resit GCSE when they've failed it is hard enough. Force them to do it for no reason at all and he will literally be dangling from a lamp post.
Giving charge of technical qualifications to the professional bodies is a much smarter idea, but will never happen unless you abolish OFQUAL and the DfE who will refuse to hand over control. Admittedly,if he did that it would be a tremendous boost to education.
Universities, just ill-informed bullshit based on snobbery, bit like the sort of stuff we see round here too often.
CPD for teachers, again, nonsense. The key thing is to keep them in the classroom not obsess about how shit they are,which they mostly aren't. In any case, it's going to be unattainable as his government is in the process of shutting the routes for teacher training which is the key source of CPD.
Red meat to the loons. He was my choice ahead of Truss because he appeared sane and with at least a shaky grasp of reality. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that neither's fit for office.
So I’ll put you down as a “maybe”?
You can put me down as saying 'among the bullshit there's one interesting idea if it can be implemented but the rest is more useless and dangerous than Dominic Cummings.'
Which to be fair is par for the course with politicians when it comes to education.
But the article says Rishi "would also work to expand the use of artificial intelligence and digital technology in classrooms and to reduce teachers’ workloads."
Expanded AI in classrooms has to be good, right? Whatever it is supposed to mean.
Every time you make changes, you increase teacher workload substantially. And there is no way of making AI work in a classroom - heck, it barely works at all yet.
Notorious liar, conman and fearmonger Gordon Brown starts a moral crusade. There is simply not enough barf on the planet for hypocrites like that.
Well, he is not my political brand, but I see the warm hearted, generous civic nationalism showing its full joyful nature here. Whether you like him or not, Brown is respected in Scotland, which is more than- to take an example completely at random- Salmond now is.
Have you any polling on this respect for Brown in Scotland?
That’s what I was thinking. I haven’t seen Brown mentioned in pollster’s battery of questions for many years.
Support for Brown and his minions (Murphy, Alexander and all the other duffers) totally collapsed in 2015. He pretty much single-handedly blew the brand: both his own and his party’s.
Being a civic nationalist does not mean that we should allow liars, conmen and fear mongers to deceive the general public uninhibited. Quite the opposite. It is my civic duty to oppose those who vociferously work against the interests of my nation.
Hate-mongers like Brown do not deserve generosity or warm-heartedness.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
Oh for God's sake. He was very clear that he was annoyed by the bias in the survey question. And as to 'do something' - what? Something we use a lot of has got much, much more expensive. There isn't a simple administrative answer.
The fundamental problem for the Conservatives is obviously that the energy crisis is a manifestation of the free market, so they have severe ideological difficulties with tackling it directly. But I think tackling it directly is what people are very much going to want them to do.
The energy market is an example of free market economics is it? I beg to differ.
The Conservatives pumping GBP1.7 billion (USD2.3 billion) into one particular sect within the industry is hardly a level playing field.
There are hundreds of other examples of the Tories mucking about with the energy market. “Free” is something that it is definitely not.
You can't be serious.
Yes, I am.
The energy market is, and always has been, totally rigged.
Government intervention is always present, on a colossal scale. You have a very odd understanding of economics if you think that the energy market is “a free market”.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
“No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality
That's a truly epic self-awareness fail from Hannan, who has been ignoring economic reality for decades.
A report says (I've not checked) that fuel costs at the pump in the US are still only half the typical European price. Why is the free market not working to dequalise that, bar the presumably relatively low cost of sending some tankers over?
In response to Hannan, the view that growth is bad in itself is still only held by a small minority. A much larger group feels that the problem of avoiding rising climate-changing emissions as a result of growth is difficult, so their position is "growth is only OK if..." Hannan's view, as I understand it, is that growth is fine regardless, and we can leave it to the market to sort out decarbonisation sometime. That, too, is a minority view, because it's evident that the interest of the individual consumer or producer doesn't necessarily coincide with the national interest.
That's a key last sentence. And betrays your political position (on the far left).
The national interest is the sum of individuals' interest. People are just as aware of the facts of climate change as you are. A vast number of them, perhaps the majority seem to have decided that growth, or other energy-using activities, are more important than any green angle.
That you appear to believe in an "l know best" approach is perhaps also a reason the left hasn't been able to win an election these past 40 years.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
Oh for God's sake. He was very clear that he was annoyed by the bias in the survey question. And as to 'do something' - what? Something we use a lot of has got much, much more expensive. There isn't a simple administrative answer.
There is - regulate the energy companies to accept their coming losses this winter. I've posted this repeatedly and will continue to do so. Bills are unpayable.
Incidentally, I crossed 50,000 posts last night, in the eight and a half years since I returned to the site.
Appropriately no. 50,000 was a pun on Ishmael and Hagar.
Lazy b****** that I am, I am still 6.5k behind you. I think these numbers are from when we changed to Vanilla so you must have been back on by then.
My feelings on this are mixed.
Of course, 40 k or 50 k posts are a significant achievement & a source of pride.
But, also, I genuinely wonder how such posters find the time.
Also, I do find it curious that so many of the ultra-prolific posters are apparently lawyers.
I mean, I know lawyers' time is valuable, because lawyers repeatedly tell me so, before telling me their rates
Law is also indescribably boring and, certainly in the case of court lawyers, involves quite a bit of downtime where quick, often witty, chat that you can drop in and out of at short notice is very attractive.
“Yorkshire’s Liz Truss”, huh? I thought she was a Buddy.
- “…makes me doubt the wisdom of laying a Labour majority at the next general election.”
Lab Maj is currently 7/2, which looks like amazingly poor value to me, and an obvious LAY. I am, of course, open to counter arguments, but it appears to me that there are only two routes to Lab Maj:
A. Labour landslide in England (45%+), or B. strong Labour recovery in Scotland (35%+)
Anybody familiar with the polling data will know that both A and B look profoundly unlikely. On a good day English Labour are hovering around the 40% mark and Scottish Labour around the 20% mark. Good, but no cigars.
Of course TSE is correct that an economic catastrophe makes A more likely, but I remain skeptical for the simple reason that so much has already gone catastrophically wrong for Cameron, May and The Oaf and yet they are still polling quite decent numbers in the low to mid 30s. If the electorate had any gumption at all the Tories would already be in the teens, or worse.
There is some speculation about inflation and our politics here. The one thing that is clear is that there is, as yet, no surge toward the conventional opposition
It is odd. Some folk get jobs in philosophy or become kirk ministers and the like. And plenty of people who do STEM end up as bankers etc.
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
My degree was in Medieval English history. It taught me a range of skills around interrogating evidence and asking questions that have been absolutely central to my professional career.
As I recover from covid, which has moved on, it has left me fatigued and not really seeking political confrontations but I would just like to make a comment or two as I see it
Truss banking on the abolition of the NI rise may not be the golden ticket she thinks it is not least, ironically, following Sunak spiking the increase in July so that it does not effect anyone earning less than £34,000 and certainly does not come into play on benefits or pensions. However, it should help companies and I do agree that holding corporation tax to a competitive 19% is sensible as we need companies to invest and expand employment levels
Sunak would be better for fiscal common-sense, but it does not look like the conservative party members are going to elect him
Brown demanding an emergency budget now is simply not going to happen but it must be one of the first announcements by the new PM. Currently every energy bill payer is to receive a £66 monthly discount from October for 6 months, up to £1,250 is being paid to many lower paid and those on benefits, and pensioners will receive up to £600 in December in their winter fuel allowance payment
I understand the total cost of these measures is £37 billion and yet listening to some nothing is being done to alleviate the crises.
More will be needed from October but no doubt we will hear from labour an onslaught on gas and oil profits with windfall taxes their answer, notwithstanding that so much of workers pension funds are invested in these dividends
I accept Brexit is not helping, but it is far and away not the only issue and listening to Bloomberg this week they are forecasting dire financial problems across Europe this winter. Additionally the drought is affecting France's nuclear industry and now Norway is suffering a water shortage for their hydro electric plants
The truth is across the UK, Europe, the US and most everywhere there is not a politician that inspires confidence and expect things to only get worse unless one very important thing happens, indeed the most important, war in Ukraine stops
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
If people are not paying bills where is the incentive to limit energy use? We have done this with health services and the result is coming close to bankrupting us all. How do we create a queue system for fuel? That is definitely not the answer.
And we do have extended facilities to write off peoples debts in trust deeds, Debt Arrangement Schemes etc. As we should have in a civilised country. But we again need to be beware of perverse incentives.
Penny Mordaunt says Liz Truss isn't ruling out further cost of living help via direct payments but adds she was making a "general point" about taking money off people through tax & then giving it back using complicated means. She says comments on this have been misinterpreted. https://twitter.com/robpowellnews/status/1556193766289154049
Does Truss say anything that doesn't later have to be "interpreted" again?
As I recover from coivid, which has moved on, it has left me fatigued and not really seeking political confrontations but I would just like to make a comment or two as I see it
Truss banking on the abolition of the NI rise may not be the golden ticket she thinks it is not least, ironically, following Sunak spiking the increase in July so that it does not effect anyone earning less than £34,000 and certainly does not come into play on benefits or pensions. However, it should help companies and I do agree that holding corporation tax to a competitive 19% is sensible as we need companies to invest and expand employment levels
Sunak would be better for fiscal common-sense, but it does not look like the conservative party members are going to elect him
Brown demanding an emergency budget now is simply not going to happen but it must be one of the first announcements by the new PM. Currently every energy bill payer is to receive a £66 monthly discount from October for 6 months, up to £1,250 is being paid to many lower paid and those on benefits, and pensioners will receive up to £600 in December in their winter fuel allowance payment
I understand the total cost of these measures is £37 billion and yet listening to some nothing is being done to alleviate the crises.
More will be needed from October but no doubt we will hear from labour an onslaught on gas and oil profits with windfall taxes their answer, notwithstanding that so much of workers pension funds are invested in these dividends
I accept Brexit is not helping, but it is far and away not the only issue and listening to Bloomberg this week they are forecasting dire financial problems across Europe this winter. Additionally the drought is affecting France's nuclear industry and now Norway is suffering a water shortage for their hydro electric plants
The truth is across the UK, Europe, the US and most everywhere there is not a politician that inspires confidence and expect things to only get worse unless one very important thing happens, indeed the most important, war in Ukraine stops
By the sound of the first sentence, one of the side effects is it has given you a Birmingham accent
It is odd. Some folk get jobs in philosophy or become kirk ministers and the like. And plenty of people who do STEM end up as bankers etc.
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
My degree was in Medieval English history. It taught me a range of skills around interrogating evidence and asking questions that have been absolutely central to my professional career.
I don't disagree - quite the opposite. I;m just struck by the crap being lapped up by the Tory Party. Or at least being flung at them on the evident assumption they'll queue up for it like an ice-cream-and-heroin van on a deprived housing scheme.
As I recover from corvid, which has moved on, it has left me fatigued and not really seeking political confrontations but I would just like to make a comment or two as I see it
Truss banking on the abolition of the NI rise may not be the golden ticket she thinks it is not least, ironically, following Sunak spiking the increase in July so that it does not effect anyone earning less than £34,000 and certainly does not come into play on benefits or pensions. However, it should help companies and I do agree that holding corporation tax to a competitive 19% is sensible as we need companies to invest and expand employment levels
Sunak would be better for fiscal common-sense, but it does not look like the conservative party members are going to elect him
Brown demanding an emergency budget now is simply not going to happen but it must be one of the first announcements by the new PM. Currently every energy bill payer is to receive a £66 monthly discount from October for 6 months, up to £1,250 is being paid to many lower paid and those on benefits, and pensioners will receive up to £600 in December in their winter fuel allowance payment
I understand the total cost of these measures is £37 billion and yet listening to some nothing is being done to alleviate the crises.
More will be needed from October but no doubt we will hear from labour an onslaught on gas and oil profits with windfall taxes their answer, notwithstanding that so much of workers pension funds are invested in these dividends
I accept Brexit is not helping, but it is far and away not the only issue and listening to Bloomberg this week they are forecasting dire financial problems across Europe this winter. Additionally the drought is affecting France's nuclear industry and now Norway is suffering a water shortage for their hydro electric plants
The truth is across the UK, Europe, the US and most everywhere there is not a politician that inspires confidence and expect things to only get worse unless one very important thing happens, indeed the most important, war in Ukraine stops
By the first sentence, one of the side effects is it has given you a Birmingham accent
As I recover from coivid, which has moved on, it has left me fatigued and not really seeking political confrontations but I would just like to make a comment or two as I see it
Truss banking on the abolition of the NI rise may not be the golden ticket she thinks it is not least, ironically, following Sunak spiking the increase in July so that it does not effect anyone earning less than £34,000 and certainly does not come into play on benefits or pensions. However, it should help companies and I do agree that holding corporation tax to a competitive 19% is sensible as we need companies to invest and expand employment levels
Sunak would be better for fiscal common-sense, but it does not look like the conservative party members are going to elect him
Brown demanding an emergency budget now is simply not going to happen but it must be one of the first announcements by the new PM. Currently every energy bill payer is to receive a £66 monthly discount from October for 6 months, up to £1,250 is being paid to many lower paid and those on benefits, and pensioners will receive up to £600 in December in their winter fuel allowance payment
I understand the total cost of these measures is £37 billion and yet listening to some nothing is being done to alleviate the crises.
More will be needed from October but no doubt we will hear from labour an onslaught on gas and oil profits with windfall taxes their answer, notwithstanding that so much of workers pension funds are invested in these dividends
I accept Brexit is not helping, but it is far and away not the only issue and listening to Bloomberg this week they are forecasting dire financial problems across Europe this winter. Additionally the drought is affecting France's nuclear industry and now Norway is suffering a water shortage for their hydro electric plants
The truth is across the UK, Europe, the US and most everywhere there is not a politician that inspires confidence and expect things to only get worse unless one very important thing happens, indeed the most important, war in Ukraine stops
By the sound of the first sentence, one of the side effects is it has given you a Birmingham accent
“No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality
That's a truly epic self-awareness fail from Hannan, who has been ignoring economic reality for decades.
A report says (I've not checked) that fuel costs at the pump in the US are still only half the typical European price. Why is the free market not working to dequalise that, bar the presumably relatively low cost of sending some tankers over?
In response to Hannan, the view that growth is bad in itself is still only held by a small minority. A much larger group feels that the problem of avoiding rising climate-changing emissions as a result of growth is difficult, so their position is "growth is only OK if..." Hannan's view, as I understand it, is that growth is fine regardless, and we can leave it to the market to sort out decarbonisation sometime. That, too, is a minority view, because it's evident that the interest of the individual consumer or producer doesn't necessarily coincide with the national interest.
That's a key last sentence. And betrays your political position (on the far left).
The national interest is the sum of individuals' interest. People are just as aware of the facts of climate change as you are. A vast number of them, perhaps the majority seem to have decided that growth, or other energy-using activities, are more important than any green angle.
That you appear to believe in an "l know best" approach is perhaps also a reason the left hasn't been able to win an election these past 40 years.
If you believe in the concept of the nation, then it has to be about more than the interests of the individuals who live in it now, doesn't it? There is also a duty to those who will live in it in the future. This is a Brexiteer argument that we hear a fair bit. We make the sacrifices of Brexit now so that future generations can benefit from the sunlit uplands that emerge from them.
It is odd. Some folk get jobs in philosophy or become kirk ministers and the like. And plenty of people who do STEM end up as bankers etc.
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
My degree was in Medieval English history. It taught me a range of skills around interrogating evidence and asking questions that have been absolutely central to my professional career.
I can't help feeling though that the bits of such subjects which have been useful to your career could have been covered in about three months.
I did a social science degree which was actually pretty relevant to the career I ended up in - but again, the stuff which was relevant was vastly outweighed by the stuff which wasn't and was never going to be. I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, nor that there isn't a role for education for its own sake. But if we were setting up a system from scratch to make graduates employable, this isn't how we'd do it.
The government needs to get out the way of onshore wind, and massively up offshore wind efforts. Cheap leccy on windy days, more expensive on still ones. The ability of householders to add solar panels borrowing passu to their mortgage rate too. And the mandating of two way charging for electric cars as a standard with the incentive of reverse charging on cloudy still days. Speeding up the rolling out of the mini nukes Opening up the country for fracking, but with some of the profits being directly to the bills of people within an area of a well. More north sea extraction Abandonment of shutting down of all types of power stations.
Penny Mordaunt says Liz Truss isn't ruling out further cost of living help via direct payments but adds she was making a "general point" about taking money off people through tax & then giving it back using complicated means. She says comments on this have been misinterpreted. https://twitter.com/robpowellnews/status/1556193766289154049
Does Truss say anything that doesn't later have to be "interpreted" again?
She really wants to be Prime Minister.
(Though if the next six months pan out the way they might, she may want to reinterpret that as well.)
It is odd. Some folk get jobs in philosophy or become kirk ministers and the like. And plenty of people who do STEM end up as bankers etc.
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
My degree was in Medieval English history. It taught me a range of skills around interrogating evidence and asking questions that have been absolutely central to my professional career.
I can't help feeling though that the bits of such subjects which have been useful to your career could have been covered in about three months.
I did a social science degree which was actually pretty relevant to the career I ended up in - but again, the stuff which was relevant was vastly outweighed by the stuff which wasn't and was never going to be. I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, nor that there isn't a role for education for its own sake. But if we were setting up a system from scratch to make graduates employable, this isn't how we'd do it.
I suppose the bits everyone else found relevant should have been cut out, for your benefit.
So Sunak is seeking 'parity of esteem' between vocational and academic education? Presumably he is inspired by Callaghan's famous 1976 Ruskin speech? Such parity has been sought, and hardly any progress made, for 50 years; maybe even since 1944, actually. Parents prefer (academic) A levels. Somebody should ask Sunak if he knows what T-levels (the latest attempt to raise the status of vocational education) are. I suspect he won't have a clue.
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
Truss tells Sunday telegraph on payments for cost of living: “I will look at what more can be done, but the way I would do things is in a Conservative way. We would put more money back in the pockets of hard-working people without delay.” Not entirely clear what that means. https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1556195714224603137
It is odd. Some folk get jobs in philosophy or become kirk ministers and the like. And plenty of people who do STEM end up as bankers etc.
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
My degree was in Medieval English history. It taught me a range of skills around interrogating evidence and asking questions that have been absolutely central to my professional career.
I can't help feeling though that the bits of such subjects which have been useful to your career could have been covered in about three months.
I did a social science degree which was actually pretty relevant to the career I ended up in - but again, the stuff which was relevant was vastly outweighed by the stuff which wasn't and was never going to be. I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, nor that there isn't a role for education for its own sake. But if we were setting up a system from scratch to make graduates employable, this isn't how we'd do it.
You learn through repetition and practice - and you also learn better when you are enjoying what you are doing. I could have been told a lot of stuff in three months. How much of it I would have absorbed to the extent that I did over three years is open to question. Part of my degree was writing a 20,000 word dissertation (Politics and Society in the Reign of King Canute, if you're asking!). I learned a shedload from doing that. I could not have done it after three months of training.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
“No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality
That's a truly epic self-awareness fail from Hannan, who has been ignoring economic reality for decades.
A report says (I've not checked) that fuel costs at the pump in the US are still only half the typical European price. Why is the free market not working to dequalise that, bar the presumably relatively low cost of sending some tankers over?
In response to Hannan, the view that growth is bad in itself is still only held by a small minority. A much larger group feels that the problem of avoiding rising climate-changing emissions as a result of growth is difficult, so their position is "growth is only OK if..." Hannan's view, as I understand it, is that growth is fine regardless, and we can leave it to the market to sort out decarbonisation sometime. That, too, is a minority view, because it's evident that the interest of the individual consumer or producer doesn't necessarily coincide with the national interest.
That's a key last sentence. And betrays your political position (on the far left).
The national interest is the sum of individuals' interest. People are just as aware of the facts of climate change as you are. A vast number of them, perhaps the majority seem to have decided that growth, or other energy-using activities, are more important than any green angle.
That you appear to believe in an "l know best" approach is perhaps also a reason the left hasn't been able to win an election these past 40 years.
If you believe in the concept of the nation, then it has to be about more than the interests of the individuals who live in it now, doesn't it? There is also a duty to those who will live in it in the future. This is a Brexiteer argument that we hear a fair bit. We make the sacrifices of Brexit now so that future generations can benefit from the sunlit uplands that emerge from them.
Everyone has the same information. Will people be selfish? Of course. But there is no duty to preserve the nation in some particular form for the future because what would that form be? Who would get to choose. And that way trouble lies.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
If people are not paying bills where is the incentive to limit energy use? We have done this with health services and the result is coming close to bankrupting us all. How do we create a queue system for fuel? That is definitely not the answer.
And we do have extended facilities to write off peoples debts in trust deeds, Debt Arrangement Schemes etc. As we should have in a civilised country. But we again need to be beware of perverse incentives.
Two points: 1. The coming mass non-payment will not make everyone have a party with energy. They may choose to have the heating in when it is cold - but they would have done that anyway. 2. Why saddle individuals with huge debts that exclude them from society and thus consuming (and driving growth) with the huge cost of managing these debts, only to then write them off? Just write them off at the start.
I don't think you comprehend just how dreadful this winter is going to be.
“Yorkshire’s Liz Truss”, huh? I thought she was a Buddy.
- “…makes me doubt the wisdom of laying a Labour majority at the next general election.”
Lab Maj is currently 7/2, which looks like amazingly poor value to me, and an obvious LAY. I am, of course, open to counter arguments, but it appears to me that there are only two routes to Lab Maj:
A. Labour landslide in England (45%+), or B. strong Labour recovery in Scotland (35%+)
Anybody familiar with the polling data will know that both A and B look profoundly unlikely. On a good day English Labour are hovering around the 40% mark and Scottish Labour around the 20% mark. Good, but no cigars.
Of course TSE is correct that an economic catastrophe makes A more likely, but I remain skeptical for the simple reason that so much has already gone catastrophically wrong for Cameron, May and The Oaf and yet they are still polling quite decent numbers in the low to mid 30s. If the electorate had any gumption at all the Tories would already be in the teens, or worse.
There is some speculation about inflation and our politics here. The one thing that is clear is that there is, as yet, no surge toward the conventional opposition
- “One in five UK households will be left with no savings at all by 2024. “
One of the biggest tragedies of modern society is that we ditched thrift. Consumerism will be the death of us. Quite literally.
Schools must teach basic financial survival skills to the next generations. Starting with the importance of building up a strong buffer.
- “And yet look at the Thursday poll that showed that, in a match-up of Starmer v Truss, it is Truss who is ahead by two points. Labour is in front in other surveys, of course, but given this climate it should be out of sight.”
This is the killer point: Starmer is a total dud. Any half-competent Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition ought to be smashing any and all named Con leaders off the field at this point in proceedings.
Mike Smithson is a huge fan of the Leader stats, and with good reason. They have a great track record of being better prediction tools than headline VI.
- “I asked Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history at the LSE, what single move the UK government could make to alleviate the pain. “Suspend Brexit for 20 years,” came the reply. He knows that’s not going to happen. But he explains that today’s crisis is not one of demand, but of supply: there’s just not enough stuff to meet demand, thanks in part to the post-Covid blockages in the global supply chain. In Britain, that’s exacerbated because we can no longer import European goods as freely or as cheaply as before.”
England and the English economy is not going to recover until they admit the horrific unforced error they have committed. I confidently predict that they won’t, and therefore can’t.
- “That decade brought a surge in political violence and a rise in support for the racist far right, in the form of the National Front. Under Boris Johnson, the Conservative party has shifted towards a nationalist populism that Truss seems unlikely to jettison. That creed is already of an ugly hue, but it could darken – especially when winter comes.”
The Conservatives are now a meld of English Nationalists, Brexit Revolutionaries and far-right thinking. It will not end well.
There is only one antidote, and that is the counter-revolution, which is inevitable. It is just a matter of time.
I've not been keeping up, is Frosty a Trusstafarian? If so there appears to be still a considerable amount of revolution to go. The flabby peer even calls it the Brexit Revolt.
People voted Conservative in 2019 to Get Brexit Done and make it go away, so we could move on.
They were sick of hearing about it. They don't want to "sustain the revolt". They want domestic public services and the economy fixed.
If voters sense that (and Labour are smart) then they will start to vote Labour the other way to make it go away again.
Yep, most people want a quiet life politically and economically. They do not want constant upheaval and confrontation. That is why they tend to react against extremism except in the most extreme circumstances. The Tories used to understand this.
It's also why lots of people used to vote Tory.
Vote Tory for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out your life.
It might not be very exciting but there's a big market for that.
As I recover from covid, which has moved on, it has left me fatigued and not really seeking political confrontations but I would just like to make a comment or two as I see it
Truss banking on the abolition of the NI rise may not be the golden ticket she thinks it is not least, ironically, following Sunak spiking the increase in July so that it does not effect anyone earning less than £34,000 and certainly does not come into play on benefits or pensions. However, it should help companies and I do agree that holding corporation tax to a competitive 19% is sensible as we need companies to invest and expand employment levels
Sunak would be better for fiscal common-sense, but it does not look like the conservative party members are going to elect him
Brown demanding an emergency budget now is simply not going to happen but it must be one of the first announcements by the new PM. Currently every energy bill payer is to receive a £66 monthly discount from October for 6 months, up to £1,250 is being paid to many lower paid and those on benefits, and pensioners will receive up to £600 in December in their winter fuel allowance payment
I understand the total cost of these measures is £37 billion and yet listening to some nothing is being done to alleviate the crises.
More will be needed from October but no doubt we will hear from labour an onslaught on gas and oil profits with windfall taxes their answer, notwithstanding that so much of workers pension funds are invested in these dividends
I accept Brexit is not helping, but it is far and away not the only issue and listening to Bloomberg this week they are forecasting dire financial problems across Europe this winter. Additionally the drought is affecting France's nuclear industry and now Norway is suffering a water shortage for their hydro electric plants
The truth is across the UK, Europe, the US and most everywhere there is not a politician that inspires confidence and expect things to only get worse unless one very important thing happens, indeed the most important, war in Ukraine stops
Glad to hear that you are recovering. With regards to Sunak already having pledged some cash to alleviate some of the effects, this is a Good Thing. Shows that unlike Mistress Truss with her "no handouts for the peons" approach, he gets it.
But it is nowhere near enough, and he seems to be saying "I have already committed a whole pile of cash, you should be thanking me". But the pledged sums are dwarfed by the coming increases...
The Times wants us to feel sorry for the ISIS brides
Grotesque. Build a courthouse in Kurdistan. Try them all and, if the locals decide, execute them all. The kids are more troubling but I’m finding it hard to be anything but *meh*
“Is it time to bring home Britain’s Isis brides and their children?”
Christina Lamb is a superb journalist but has always been sentimentalist.
I think any case for repatriation would have to be based on utter repentance and evidence they were groomed as children. Then, there would need to be an 18 month - 2 year programme of deradicalisation upon arrival too, and maybe regular social services/police check-ins for years. All of which would cost but might be the right to thing to do.
Otherwise they made their bed.
I think that evidence of repentance for adults and non-involvement for kids would do. But it does strike me as onbjectionable that we should prioritise them over the numerous other refugees to whom we continue to offer a hostile environment. If we collectively decide we can accommodate more refugees, why don't we start with, for example, taking more Syrians or Afghans with no record of involvement in politics at all?
Not all refugees are created equal and, realistically, we will likely always prefer those more likely to be at home in Britain and in alignment with British values.
If we can choose, that means a bias to Hong Kong and persecuted political dissidents against our enemies (Russian and the CCP) and oppressed Christians, I suspect.
Why? Because we think that's our duty and other nations a better fit for the rest.
“Yorkshire’s Liz Truss”, huh? I thought she was a Buddy.
- “…makes me doubt the wisdom of laying a Labour majority at the next general election.”
Lab Maj is currently 7/2, which looks like amazingly poor value to me, and an obvious LAY. I am, of course, open to counter arguments, but it appears to me that there are only two routes to Lab Maj:
A. Labour landslide in England (45%+), or B. strong Labour recovery in Scotland (35%+)
Anybody familiar with the polling data will know that both A and B look profoundly unlikely. On a good day English Labour are hovering around the 40% mark and Scottish Labour around the 20% mark. Good, but no cigars.
Of course TSE is correct that an economic catastrophe makes A more likely, but I remain skeptical for the simple reason that so much has already gone catastrophically wrong for Cameron, May and The Oaf and yet they are still polling quite decent numbers in the low to mid 30s. If the electorate had any gumption at all the Tories would already be in the teens, or worse.
There is some speculation about inflation and our politics here. The one thing that is clear is that there is, as yet, no surge toward the conventional opposition
- “One in five UK households will be left with no savings at all by 2024. “
One of the biggest tragedies of modern society is that we ditched thrift. Consumerism will be the death of us. Quite literally.
Schools must teach basic financial survival skills to the next generations. Starting with the importance of building up a strong buffer.
- “And yet look at the Thursday poll that showed that, in a match-up of Starmer v Truss, it is Truss who is ahead by two points. Labour is in front in other surveys, of course, but given this climate it should be out of sight.”
This is the killer point: Starmer is a total dud. Any half-competent Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition ought to be smashing any and all named Con leaders off the field at this point in proceedings.
Mike Smithson is a huge fan of the Leader stats, and with good reason. They have a great track record of being better prediction tools than headline VI.
- “I asked Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history at the LSE, what single move the UK government could make to alleviate the pain. “Suspend Brexit for 20 years,” came the reply. He knows that’s not going to happen. But he explains that today’s crisis is not one of demand, but of supply: there’s just not enough stuff to meet demand, thanks in part to the post-Covid blockages in the global supply chain. In Britain, that’s exacerbated because we can no longer import European goods as freely or as cheaply as before.”
England and the English economy is not going to recover until they admit the horrific unforced error they have committed. I confidently predict that they won’t, and therefore can’t.
- “That decade brought a surge in political violence and a rise in support for the racist far right, in the form of the National Front. Under Boris Johnson, the Conservative party has shifted towards a nationalist populism that Truss seems unlikely to jettison. That creed is already of an ugly hue, but it could darken – especially when winter comes.”
The Conservatives are now a meld of English Nationalists, Brexit Revolutionaries and far-right thinking. It will not end well.
There is only one antidote, and that is the counter-revolution, which is inevitable. It is just a matter of time.
I've not been keeping up, is Frosty a Trusstafarian? If so there appears to be still a considerable amount of revolution to go. The flabby peer even calls it the Brexit Revolt.
People voted Conservative in 2019 to Get Brexit Done and make it go away, so we could move on.
They were sick of hearing about it. They don't want to "sustain the revolt". They want domestic public services and the economy fixed.
If voters sense that (and Labour are smart) then they will start to vote Labour the other way to make it go away again.
Yep, most people want a quiet life politically and economically. They do not want constant upheaval and confrontation. That is why they tend to react against extremism except in the most extreme circumstances. The Tories used to understand this.
It's also why lots of people used to vote Tory.
Vote Tory for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out your life.
It might not be very exciting but there's a big market for that.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
“No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality
That's a truly epic self-awareness fail from Hannan, who has been ignoring economic reality for decades.
A report says (I've not checked) that fuel costs at the pump in the US are still only half the typical European price. Why is the free market not working to dequalise that, bar the presumably relatively low cost of sending some tankers over?
In response to Hannan, the view that growth is bad in itself is still only held by a small minority. A much larger group feels that the problem of avoiding rising climate-changing emissions as a result of growth is difficult, so their position is "growth is only OK if..." Hannan's view, as I understand it, is that growth is fine regardless, and we can leave it to the market to sort out decarbonisation sometime. That, too, is a minority view, because it's evident that the interest of the individual consumer or producer doesn't necessarily coincide with the national interest.
That's a key last sentence. And betrays your political position (on the far left).
The national interest is the sum of individuals' interest. People are just as aware of the facts of climate change as you are. A vast number of them, perhaps the majority seem to have decided that growth, or other energy-using activities, are more important than any green angle.
That you appear to believe in an "l know best" approach is perhaps also a reason the left hasn't been able to win an election these past 40 years.
If you believe in the concept of the nation, then it has to be about more than the interests of the individuals who live in it now, doesn't it? There is also a duty to those who will live in it in the future. This is a Brexiteer argument that we hear a fair bit. We make the sacrifices of Brexit now so that future generations can benefit from the sunlit uplands that emerge from them.
Everyone has the same information. Will people be selfish? Of course. But there is no duty to preserve the nation in some particular form for the future because what would that form be? Who would get to choose. And that way trouble lies.
Isn't the point of representative democracy that while everyone has access to the same information, not everyone has the time or inclination to actually access and assess it, and then come to a conclusion about what to do with it?
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
That would, of course, be an enormous incentive to invest more in energy production mitigating future problems 😒
We need solutions that work with the market, not against it.
“No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality
That's a truly epic self-awareness fail from Hannan, who has been ignoring economic reality for decades.
A report says (I've not checked) that fuel costs at the pump in the US are still only half the typical European price. Why is the free market not working to dequalise that, bar the presumably relatively low cost of sending some tankers over?
In response to Hannan, the view that growth is bad in itself is still only held by a small minority. A much larger group feels that the problem of avoiding rising climate-changing emissions as a result of growth is difficult, so their position is "growth is only OK if..." Hannan's view, as I understand it, is that growth is fine regardless, and we can leave it to the market to sort out decarbonisation sometime. That, too, is a minority view, because it's evident that the interest of the individual consumer or producer doesn't necessarily coincide with the national interest.
That's a key last sentence. And betrays your political position (on the far left).
The national interest is the sum of individuals' interest. People are just as aware of the facts of climate change as you are. A vast number of them, perhaps the majority seem to have decided that growth, or other energy-using activities, are more important than any green angle.
That you appear to believe in an "l know best" approach is perhaps also a reason the left hasn't been able to win an election these past 40 years.
If you believe in the concept of the nation, then it has to be about more than the interests of the individuals who live in it now, doesn't it? There is also a duty to those who will live in it in the future. This is a Brexiteer argument that we hear a fair bit. We make the sacrifices of Brexit now so that future generations can benefit from the sunlit uplands that emerge from them.
Everyone has the same information. Will people be selfish? Of course. But there is no duty to preserve the nation in some particular form for the future because what would that form be? Who would get to choose. And that way trouble lies.
Isn't the point of representative democracy that while everyone has access to the same information, not everyone has the time or inclination to actually access and assess it, and then come to a conclusion about what to do with it?
People choose the parties which most closely align with their interests. I don't think anyone completely delegates their political view to any of the parties.
Nick was talking about "consumers and producers". Who else does that leave.
Vote Tory for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out your life.
It might not be very exciting but there's a big market for that.
That's exactly the opposite of Truss' pitch
And it goes back to the convulsion that has hit the Conservatives since the mid 1990s.
Stable boring government in the national interest isn't fun to do. Much more enjoyable to dream big dreams, march in and change everything. Show that you're in charge.
At some point, the Conservative Party decided it wasn't interested in being conservative any more. May was probably the last gasp of that tradition, and look what happened to her.
(And this does have a European dimension, of course it does. What some mock as EU sclerosis can also be read as setting an OK set of rules and letting business work using them because that's preferable to rules that change a lot in space and time. Boring government that sits in the background.)
There were similar arguments in the run-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine this past February. And Russia invaded.
China's population is set to start declining. If the Chinese leadership convince themselves that it's now or never they will likely choose now.
That's WW3, then.
Sadly I think that is likely to be the case. China has held off on attacking Taiwan up to now because it has correctly determined that it will have a better chance of doing so in the future.
Once that calculus changes the only way to prevent an attack is to convince the Chinese leadership to accept Taiwanese independence without war as preferable to Taiwanese independence after losing a war.
The deterrence to such an attack does not seem strong enough to prevent it.
We need to do all we can to prepare ourselves for this, but many months into Russia's war on Ukraine and we can't even agree to build more onshore wind turbines to replace Russian gas, nor have we accelerated investment for battery factories, etc.
We are squandering the opportunity to prepare for a crisis, to learn its impact on us.
“Yorkshire’s Liz Truss”, huh? I thought she was a Buddy.
- “…makes me doubt the wisdom of laying a Labour majority at the next general election.”
Lab Maj is currently 7/2, which looks like amazingly poor value to me, and an obvious LAY. I am, of course, open to counter arguments, but it appears to me that there are only two routes to Lab Maj:
A. Labour landslide in England (45%+), or B. strong Labour recovery in Scotland (35%+)
Anybody familiar with the polling data will know that both A and B look profoundly unlikely. On a good day English Labour are hovering around the 40% mark and Scottish Labour around the 20% mark. Good, but no cigars.
Of course TSE is correct that an economic catastrophe makes A more likely, but I remain skeptical for the simple reason that so much has already gone catastrophically wrong for Cameron, May and The Oaf and yet they are still polling quite decent numbers in the low to mid 30s. If the electorate had any gumption at all the Tories would already be in the teens, or worse.
There is some speculation about inflation and our politics here. The one thing that is clear is that there is, as yet, no surge toward the conventional opposition
- “One in five UK households will be left with no savings at all by 2024. “
One of the biggest tragedies of modern society is that we ditched thrift. Consumerism will be the death of us. Quite literally.
Schools must teach basic financial survival skills to the next generations. Starting with the importance of building up a strong buffer.
- “And yet look at the Thursday poll that showed that, in a match-up of Starmer v Truss, it is Truss who is ahead by two points. Labour is in front in other surveys, of course, but given this climate it should be out of sight.”
This is the killer point: Starmer is a total dud. Any half-competent Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition ought to be smashing any and all named Con leaders off the field at this point in proceedings.
Mike Smithson is a huge fan of the Leader stats, and with good reason. They have a great track record of being better prediction tools than headline VI.
- “I asked Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history at the LSE, what single move the UK government could make to alleviate the pain. “Suspend Brexit for 20 years,” came the reply. He knows that’s not going to happen. But he explains that today’s crisis is not one of demand, but of supply: there’s just not enough stuff to meet demand, thanks in part to the post-Covid blockages in the global supply chain. In Britain, that’s exacerbated because we can no longer import European goods as freely or as cheaply as before.”
England and the English economy is not going to recover until they admit the horrific unforced error they have committed. I confidently predict that they won’t, and therefore can’t.
- “That decade brought a surge in political violence and a rise in support for the racist far right, in the form of the National Front. Under Boris Johnson, the Conservative party has shifted towards a nationalist populism that Truss seems unlikely to jettison. That creed is already of an ugly hue, but it could darken – especially when winter comes.”
The Conservatives are now a meld of English Nationalists, Brexit Revolutionaries and far-right thinking. It will not end well.
There is only one antidote, and that is the counter-revolution, which is inevitable. It is just a matter of time.
I've not been keeping up, is Frosty a Trusstafarian? If so there appears to be still a considerable amount of revolution to go. The flabby peer even calls it the Brexit Revolt.
People voted Conservative in 2019 to Get Brexit Done and make it go away, so we could move on.
They were sick of hearing about it. They don't want to "sustain the revolt". They want domestic public services and the economy fixed.
If voters sense that (and Labour are smart) then they will start to vote Labour the other way to make it go away again.
I largely agree with that, certainly for England, but (mysteriously to me since he seems to have risen without trace) Frost appears to hold sway in the Tory party and therefore our government.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
That would, of course, be an enormous incentive to invest more in energy production mitigating future problems 😒
We need solutions that work with the market, not against it.
Fine - propose one! You and I know fully well that this government will not act with sufficient speed or cash to make bills viable for people to pay. You then propose that millions of the already poorest in our society get weighed down by unpayable debt to be harassed for a period of time before said debt gets written off.
Remember how this process works. I owe SSE £1,000. They sell this debt off to a debt collection company for £100 and write off the rest. So your proposal has a big corporate write off anyway - why not just do it up front? The government can give these companies a tax cut to make them feel ok about it.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
That would, of course, be an enormous incentive to invest more in energy production mitigating future problems 😒
We need solutions that work with the market, not against it.
The one element of the market that's gone up for both gas and leccy is gas, as gas basically sets the price for leccy too now. But extraction costs haven't really changed. It's basically just a straight arb for profit now
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
It is a genius plan, but it might also be wishful thinking. After all, Boris was definitely going to grow up and become serious, Prince Hal to King Henry, as soon as he became PM.
It is odd. Some folk get jobs in philosophy or become kirk ministers and the like. And plenty of people who do STEM end up as bankers etc.
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
My degree was in Medieval English history. It taught me a range of skills around interrogating evidence and asking questions that have been absolutely central to my professional career.
I can't help feeling though that the bits of such subjects which have been useful to your career could have been covered in about three months.
I did a social science degree which was actually pretty relevant to the career I ended up in - but again, the stuff which was relevant was vastly outweighed by the stuff which wasn't and was never going to be. I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, nor that there isn't a role for education for its own sake. But if we were setting up a system from scratch to make graduates employable, this isn't how we'd do it.
I suppose the bits everyone else found relevant should have been cut out, for your benefit.
No but most degrees aren't worth the cost of them...
Remember - the 1997 onward increase in university numbers was designed to mask youth unemployment...
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
That would, of course, be an enormous incentive to invest more in energy production mitigating future problems 😒
We need solutions that work with the market, not against it.
I can't think of a worse policy than having an amnesty for non-payment of utility bills. Food prices and taxes have risen, but we wouldn't introduce an amnesty for shoplifters or tax evaders.
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
A valid question. Our anthem is tedious. The England flag was nicked from someone else, the union flag looks as contrived as it is.
Worse is that the England team lay the wrong anthem. God Save The Queen is the UK national anthem. Home nations rightly have separate anthems - except England. So we get to here the dirge when it isn't even appropriate.
John Stevens @johnestevens · 22m Liz Truss's reversal of NI hike would give a full-time worker on National Living Wage just £59, but someone on six figure salary would get more than £1,000, according to figures from Team Sunak
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
If there is widespread non-payment of bills the energy companies will go bust and the government will have to step in to ensure energy imports are still paid for.
I guess it would be a way of nationalising the energy industry without having to pay to buy it.
Worse is that the England team lay the wrong anthem. God Save The Queen is the UK national anthem. Home nations rightly have separate anthems - except England. So we get to here the dirge when it isn't even appropriate.
At the Commies the England anthem is Jerusalem.
At least we are saved the tragic display of England players not knowing the words to God Save the Queen...
This can't be a surprise to anybody remotely familiar with the oeuvre of the alt.com Thatcher. There has always been an absolutely unmediated connection between her defective brain and her Mrs Mangel mouth. She just says fucking anything regardless of consequence or grounding in reality. Eg encouraging people to join the Azov Shutzstaffel in Mariupol, Voronezhgate and the Euxine freedom flotilla she dreamed up. And that's just the last six months.
There were similar arguments in the run-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine this past February. And Russia invaded.
China's population is set to start declining. If the Chinese leadership convince themselves that it's now or never they will likely choose now.
That's WW3, then.
Sadly I think that is likely to be the case. China has held off on attacking Taiwan up to now because it has correctly determined that it will have a better chance of doing so in the future.
Once that calculus changes the only way to prevent an attack is to convince the Chinese leadership to accept Taiwanese independence without war as preferable to Taiwanese independence after losing a war.
The deterrence to such an attack does not seem strong enough to prevent it.
We need to do all we can to prepare ourselves for this, but many months into Russia's war on Ukraine and we can't even agree to build more onshore wind turbines to replace Russian gas, nor have we accelerated investment for battery factories, etc.
We are squandering the opportunity to prepare for a crisis, to learn its impact on us.
Taiwanese independence. Taiwan is de facto, but not de jure, independent. There will be no de jure independence without a war. Because, the Taiwanese, let alone the rest of the World don't want it, as it will lead to war. What is needed is for the status quo to work for both sides. Which it was before Xi came along. And still is, in reality.
There has always been an absolutely unmediated connection between her defective brain and her Mrs Mangel mouth. She just says fucking anything regardless of consequence or grounding in reality.
I might be an idiot 😀... But even I can see that Corporation tax cuts and NI cuts for the better paid will do nothing to help people with CPI and fuel bills in particular.
John Stevens @johnestevens · 22m Liz Truss's reversal of NI hike would give a full-time worker on National Living Wage just £59, but someone on six figure salary would get more than £1,000, according to figures from Team Sunak
John Stevens @johnestevens · 22m Liz Truss's reversal of NI hike would give a full-time worker on National Living Wage just £59, but someone on six figure salary would get more than £1,000, according to figures from Team Sunak
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
You’ve obviously yet to realise how cool and hip a pair of UJ emblazoned polycotton underpants displayed on a stall of tourist tat in foreign climes can be.
Anyway was out with friends last night and finally discovered a benefit of Brexit. One of them was a nurse but is now permanently employed by the NHS in a new role to essentially make sure they have the correct customs forms and assorted paperwork on all the medicines and medical equipment that the NHS imports.
I might be an idiot 😀... But even I can see that Corporation tax cuts and NI cuts for the better paid will do nothing to help people with CPI and fuel bills in particular.
If I can see that why can't Liz???
She is totally focused on the well-off southern brexity pensioners who form the majority of the membership.
Soon as she is in No10 events will move fast and she will be reaching for the energy handouts to stop the rioting and the non-payment protests.
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
I completely disagree about the flag, much as I'm instinctively wary of nationalism.
Blue, white and red are a great colour combination, as you can see in this great knitted shawl.
The flag has rotational symmetry, which is genius and distinctive. And it's way more interesting than the dull, dull, dull tricolours used by so many countries.
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
A valid question. Our anthem is tedious. The England flag was nicked from someone else, the union flag looks as contrived as it is.
Worse is that the England team lay the wrong anthem. God Save The Queen is the UK national anthem. Home nations rightly have separate anthems - except England. So we get to here the dirge when it isn't even appropriate.
Jerusalem is a much better song and the English would be wise to adopt it more broadly. Another thing that bothers me about the Union flag is that it fails even on its own terms. There is no representation of Wales in the flag, and the St Patrick's saltire isn't used by the only bit of Ireland that remains in the Union (and in fact was never really used by the Irish at all).
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
If there is widespread non-payment of bills the energy companies will go bust and the government will have to step in to ensure energy imports are still paid for.
I guess it would be a way of nationalising the energy industry without having to pay to buy it.
This is the point I haven't seen addressed. There will be widespread non-payment, whether deliberate or not. So energy companies will need either support, or go under. It is the reason their dividends were neither wise, nor free market. They were blackmail of the public purse.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
If there is widespread non-payment of bills the energy companies will go bust and the government will have to step in to ensure energy imports are still paid for.
I guess it would be a way of nationalising the energy industry without having to pay to buy it.
Not sure it is the customer facing firms coining it in, thought it was their suppliers?
Regardless of what either candidate says, or what they want to do, the govt will be offering further massive subsidies on energy this winter. It is simply inevitable.
I might be an idiot 😀... But even I can see that Corporation tax cuts and NI cuts for the better paid will do nothing to help people with CPI and fuel bills in particular.
If I can see that why can't Liz???
Because that isn't what the voters in this election want - they want continual dividend payments - and probably don't care or like the NI changes because it doesn't impact them.
It should of course be pointed out that the rising energy bills are directly linked to the war in Ukraine, with the sanctions on Russian energy supplies. Truss taking a tough line with Putin and pushing to resolve that is therefore the best long term solution.
In the short term of course more support for consumers would have to be funded by higher taxes if it is to avoid a rising deficit, which means you take with one hand and give with the other
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
A valid question. Our anthem is tedious. The England flag was nicked from someone else, the union flag looks as contrived as it is.
Worse is that the England team lay the wrong anthem. God Save The Queen is the UK national anthem. Home nations rightly have separate anthems - except England. So we get to here the dirge when it isn't even appropriate.
Jerusalem is a much better song and the English would be wise to adopt it more broadly. Another thing that bothers me about the Union flag is that it fails even on its own terms. There is no representation of Wales in the flag, and the St Patrick's saltire isn't used by the only bit of Ireland that remains in the Union (and in fact was never really used by the Irish at all).
Wales is technically part of the Kingdom of England, the Union was created by the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England. There is a Prince of Wales but it is not a Kingdom. In the remainder of Ireland still in the UK the Unionists are mainly descended from Presbyterian Scots.
John Stevens @johnestevens · 22m Liz Truss's reversal of NI hike would give a full-time worker on National Living Wage just £59, but someone on six figure salary would get more than £1,000, according to figures from Team Sunak
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
I agree our flag is so ugly. Like so much else poisonous in this country it is because of political correctness. When we absorbed Scotland and Ireland we had to pretend it was a partnership so we included their flags in our flag. So the beautiful simple English flag was corrupted. However it is well known so we seem to be stuck with it.
I might be an idiot 😀... But even I can see that Corporation tax cuts and NI cuts for the better paid will do nothing to help people with CPI and fuel bills in particular.
If I can see that why can't Liz???
Because that isn't what the voters in this election want - they want continual dividend payments - and probably don't care or like the NI changes because it doesn't impact them.
I can see her being a complete dud before the winter is out.
And wee Union Jacks on insulation. That’ll do the trick.
Does a Union Jack not give you a warm glow all of its own Stuart?
Only if decent accelerant is applied.
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
I've never liked the Union flag. It's not an ideological thing, I just think it's unattractive. I don't like the colour combination, it's too busy, and it's not even symmetric. It's just an ugly flag. Like our ugly, tuneless dirge of a national anthem. Why are our totems of nationhood so rubbish?
A valid question. Our anthem is tedious. The England flag was nicked from someone else, the union flag looks as contrived as it is.
Worse is that the England team lay the wrong anthem. God Save The Queen is the UK national anthem. Home nations rightly have separate anthems - except England. So we get to here the dirge when it isn't even appropriate.
In the Commonwealth Games currently going on Jerusalem is the England team's anthem not GSTQ
“No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders – TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth. … But raising the price of energy is not something we can do in isolation. When power becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not simply one among many commodities; it is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth. … When did you last hear a politician admit as much? When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal and later oil liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery?”
Hang on a minute. Where is the bountiful cheap energy we have been ignoring?
Gas? This *was* cheap. But the free market "Dash for Gas" allowed scumbags like Norweb build gas-fired power stations to burn North Sea reserves in a decade. Which makes us reliant on imported gas from dodgy places which isn't cheao.
Coal? We *could* have invested in CCS and kept places like Drax open, burning domestic coal and pumping the emissions underground. But no, coal miners are communists.
Nuclear? The chance for a renaissance of British nuclear was killed by Nick Clegg in 2010. So what we have is now decades late and absurdly expensive.
Which leaves renewables. We *could* have been leading on this. We have a lot of wind turbines - built by countries like Germany - and increasingly solar. With absurd rigged transmission prices to make it expensive despite us having so much available. Put solar and a battery on every new build for the last decade and that would have made a real difference.
So what is Hannanananan drooling on about?
I find it fascinating that many of the ex-miners I know are generally extremely socially conservative, though admittedly most of them are knocking on a bit now. I expect a lot of them will be, and always will have been, generally receptive to Conservative ideas. Not all of them, but plenty of them. More than you might think.
If the Tories had shovelled money at them and invested in the industry in the 80s they might well have captured the Red Wall decades ago, and we might still have a domestic deep-mining industry providing coal to clean, CCS-equipped power stations. Giving us a large degree of energy security. With well-paid jobs for grateful miners and their communities. Ferrybridge C and Eggborough - the other two huge coal-fired, and now demolished, power stations along with Drax I grew up in the shadow of - would still be operational, providing more well-paid jobs locally.
The built in bias in questions like this just annoys me. Of course no one is going to unaffected by increasing energy costs like this but the vast majority will cope by rebalancing other spending and being a bit more careful when the heating is put on. They may even resort to jumpers.
Sunak set a dangerous precedent in having the government effectively pay for the first round of these increases but this was (a) unrepeatable and (b) a one off leaving us fully exposed to the increases next year. The only way of avoiding that would be a reduction in the global energy prices which is possible but far from certain.
Most peoples response to this will be to demand more wages resulting in another sprial of inflation and public sector strikes. So what does a Truss government do?
I think that green levies and VAT on fuel do indeed have to go. We are making a very bad situation worse for ourselves. It is unnecessary. Their suspension will be another suspended fuel duty escalator if you can remember that. I think this will be prioritised over CT tax cuts.
We absolutely need to get on with fracking and doing what we can to squeeze more gas out of the north sea.
We do indeed need to get on with insulation, even more wind, solar and tidal. Not only do all these help with balance of payments, it also makes us much less vulnerable to international energy markets. They should be branded as making Britain secure and they will help.
Sorry that millions sliding into a dire poverty you can barely comprehend annoys you. In a decent society it isn't only about the "vast majority", its how we treat those who fall below this middle band.
Energy bills will be higher than wages and UC payments. Literally impossible to pay. And for millions of others who work the bills will take us such a proportion of money that they go way beyond "just put a jumper on".
The challenge right now is to set aside the long term questions and focus on the micro - how to get people though this winter. It simply doesn't matter what the long term policy debates are, people are going to suffer grinding poverty in a few months unless this shitbox party you support does something.
I completely agree that the limited resources we have to help should be focused on the poorest. That is why I opposed Sunak's refunds which were far too widely spread and should have been limited to those on benefits. The elimination of green tariffs and VAT will help the larger users (probably the better off) more and will need to be supplemented by targeted additional assistance for those most in need but we cannot be in a position where the government is expected to pick up the tab of higher energy costs for everyone. We simply cannot afford to do that.
That is fiddling around the edges as people die. What they need to be talking about is: 1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay 2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
I'm supportive of paying more tax to help those at the bottom of the pile afford to pay to heat their homes, but how would you organise an amnesty for unpaid energy bills to ensure that rich chancers wouldn't simply save themselves a few thousand pounds at my expense?
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
I would do the things you suggest as well. But the reality is clear - adding £20 onto UC whilst something is not going to fix this problem.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
If there is widespread non-payment of bills the energy companies will go bust and the government will have to step in to ensure energy imports are still paid for.
I guess it would be a way of nationalising the energy industry without having to pay to buy it.
This is the point I haven't seen addressed. There will be widespread non-payment, whether deliberate or not. So energy companies will need either support, or go under. It is the reason their dividends were neither wise, nor free market. They were blackmail of the public purse.
Just realism. The firms supplying us can't pay for energy on the international market with IOUs from bankrupt or uncooperative customers anyway. If we want a functioning energy supply for the next few years the government are subsidising a massive chunk of the increases (and the first set of subsidies only deals with the first of the increases, not the bigger subsequent ones). And we do want one, so that is what shall happen.
I don't understand why Truss thinks its sensible to deny this and do a u-turn later but her position will be reversed in time.
It should of course be pointed out that the rising energy bills are directly linked to the war in Ukraine, with the sanctions on Russian energy supplies. Truss taking a tough line with Putin and pushing to resolve that is therefore the best long term solution.
In the short term of course more support for consumers would have to be funded by higher taxes if it is to avoid a rising deficit, which means you take with one hand and give with the other
The government's ability to borrow long-term means that it can borrow during a crisis and repay when the crisis is past, so the two hands you reference can be separated in time.
We can also decide collectively that we wish for those who are most able to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, and so we can mandate the government to tax those who can afford to pay more so that those who can't can still heat their homes. So the two hands you reference are acting as different points one the income and wealth scale.
“Yorkshire’s Liz Truss”, huh? I thought she was a Buddy.
- “…makes me doubt the wisdom of laying a Labour majority at the next general election.”
Lab Maj is currently 7/2, which looks like amazingly poor value to me, and an obvious LAY. I am, of course, open to counter arguments, but it appears to me that there are only two routes to Lab Maj:
A. Labour landslide in England (45%+), or B. strong Labour recovery in Scotland (35%+)
Anybody familiar with the polling data will know that both A and B look profoundly unlikely. On a good day English Labour are hovering around the 40% mark and Scottish Labour around the 20% mark. Good, but no cigars.
Of course TSE is correct that an economic catastrophe makes A more likely, but I remain skeptical for the simple reason that so much has already gone catastrophically wrong for Cameron, May and The Oaf and yet they are still polling quite decent numbers in the low to mid 30s. If the electorate had any gumption at all the Tories would already be in the teens, or worse.
There is some speculation about inflation and our politics here. The one thing that is clear is that there is, as yet, no surge toward the conventional opposition
- “One in five UK households will be left with no savings at all by 2024. “
One of the biggest tragedies of modern society is that we ditched thrift. Consumerism will be the death of us. Quite literally.
Schools must teach basic financial survival skills to the next generations. Starting with the importance of building up a strong buffer.
- “And yet look at the Thursday poll that showed that, in a match-up of Starmer v Truss, it is Truss who is ahead by two points. Labour is in front in other surveys, of course, but given this climate it should be out of sight.”
This is the killer point: Starmer is a total dud. Any half-competent Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition ought to be smashing any and all named Con leaders off the field at this point in proceedings.
Mike Smithson is a huge fan of the Leader stats, and with good reason. They have a great track record of being better prediction tools than headline VI.
- “I asked Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history at the LSE, what single move the UK government could make to alleviate the pain. “Suspend Brexit for 20 years,” came the reply. He knows that’s not going to happen. But he explains that today’s crisis is not one of demand, but of supply: there’s just not enough stuff to meet demand, thanks in part to the post-Covid blockages in the global supply chain. In Britain, that’s exacerbated because we can no longer import European goods as freely or as cheaply as before.”
England and the English economy is not going to recover until they admit the horrific unforced error they have committed. I confidently predict that they won’t, and therefore can’t.
- “That decade brought a surge in political violence and a rise in support for the racist far right, in the form of the National Front. Under Boris Johnson, the Conservative party has shifted towards a nationalist populism that Truss seems unlikely to jettison. That creed is already of an ugly hue, but it could darken – especially when winter comes.”
The Conservatives are now a meld of English Nationalists, Brexit Revolutionaries and far-right thinking. It will not end well.
There is only one antidote, and that is the counter-revolution, which is inevitable. It is just a matter of time.
I've not been keeping up, is Frosty a Trusstafarian? If so there appears to be still a considerable amount of revolution to go. The flabby peer even calls it the Brexit Revolt.
People voted Conservative in 2019 to Get Brexit Done and make it go away, so we could move on.
They were sick of hearing about it. They don't want to "sustain the revolt". They want domestic public services and the economy fixed.
If voters sense that (and Labour are smart) then they will start to vote Labour the other way to make it go away again.
Yep, most people want a quiet life politically and economically. They do not want constant upheaval and confrontation. That is why they tend to react against extremism except in the most extreme circumstances. The Tories used to understand this.
It's also why lots of people used to vote Tory.
Vote Tory for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out your life.
It might not be very exciting but there's a big market for that.
Which is why Starmer has a chance.
Vote Starmer for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out of your life.
Comments
Support for Brown and his minions (Murphy, Alexander and all the other duffers) totally collapsed in 2015. He pretty much single-handedly blew the brand: both his own and his party’s.
Being a civic nationalist does not mean that we should allow liars, conmen and fear mongers to deceive the general public uninhibited. Quite the opposite. It is my civic duty to oppose those who vociferously work against the interests of my nation.
Hate-mongers like Brown do not deserve generosity or warm-heartedness.
That's thirty billion quid.
In this case a blockade would be a precursor to invasion.
And as to 'do something' - what? Something we use a lot of has got much, much more expensive. There isn't a simple administrative answer.
China's population is set to start declining. If the Chinese leadership convince themselves that it's now or never they will likely choose now.
The energy market is, and always has been, totally rigged.
Government intervention is always present, on a colossal scale. You have a very odd understanding of economics if you think that the energy market is “a free market”.
1. Amnesty for non-payment. These bills are not getting paid because its impossible to do so. Accept that, mandate the various companies - energy, internet, landlords etc - to not cut people off or throw them out when they don't pay
2. Amnesty for debt. No point taking unpayable bills now and turning them int unpayable debt. The energy companies are making record profits, loss is a risk, this winter they will make a loss for a few months. Its called business.
Once we get to late Spring 2023 and the threat to life is over, we can discuss green tariffs. But Mistress Truss says "no handouts" to individuals to allow tax cuts for energy companies. So we know where this is going...
The national interest is the sum of individuals' interest. People are just as aware of the facts of climate change as you are. A vast number of them, perhaps the majority seem to have decided that growth, or other energy-using activities, are more important than any green angle.
That you appear to believe in an "l know best" approach is perhaps also a reason the left hasn't been able to win an election these past 40 years.
An awful lot of people are about to “learn by doing”. Ouch!
And what about the classics and the history of art which are apparently the best and poshest and most intellectual of all degrees?
As I recover from covid, which has moved on, it has left me fatigued and not really seeking political confrontations but I would just like to make a comment or two as I see it
Truss banking on the abolition of the NI rise may not be the golden ticket she thinks it is not least, ironically, following Sunak spiking the increase in July so that it does not effect anyone earning less than £34,000 and certainly does not come into play on benefits or pensions. However, it should help companies and I do agree that holding corporation tax to a competitive 19% is sensible as we need companies to invest and expand employment levels
Sunak would be better for fiscal common-sense, but it does not look like the conservative party members are going to elect him
Brown demanding an emergency budget now is simply not going to happen but it must be one of the first announcements by the new PM. Currently every energy bill payer is to receive a £66 monthly discount from October for 6 months, up to £1,250 is being paid to many lower paid and those on benefits, and pensioners will receive up to £600 in December in their winter fuel allowance payment
I understand the total cost of these measures is £37 billion and yet listening to some nothing is being done to alleviate the crises.
More will be needed from October but no doubt we will hear from labour an onslaught on gas and oil profits with windfall taxes their answer, notwithstanding that so much of workers pension funds are invested in these dividends
I accept Brexit is not helping, but it is far and away not the only issue and listening to Bloomberg this week they are forecasting dire financial problems across Europe this winter. Additionally the drought is affecting France's nuclear industry and now Norway is suffering a water shortage for their hydro electric plants
The truth is across the UK, Europe, the US and most everywhere there is not a politician that inspires confidence and expect things to only get worse unless one very important thing happens, indeed the most important, war in Ukraine stops
And we do have extended facilities to write off peoples debts in trust deeds, Debt Arrangement Schemes etc. As we should have in a civilised country. But we again need to be beware of perverse incentives.
https://twitter.com/robpowellnews/status/1556193766289154049
Does Truss say anything that doesn't later have to be "interpreted" again?
(Coivid)
I did a social science degree which was actually pretty relevant to the career I ended up in - but again, the stuff which was relevant was vastly outweighed by the stuff which wasn't and was never going to be.
I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, nor that there isn't a role for education for its own sake. But if we were setting up a system from scratch to make graduates employable, this isn't how we'd do it.
Cheap leccy on windy days, more expensive on still ones.
The ability of householders to add solar panels borrowing passu to their mortgage rate too.
And the mandating of two way charging for electric cars as a standard with the incentive of reverse charging on cloudy still days.
Speeding up the rolling out of the mini nukes
Opening up the country for fracking, but with some of the profits being directly to the bills of people within an area of a well.
More north sea extraction
Abandonment of shutting down of all types of power stations.
(Though if the next six months pan out the way they might, she may want to reinterpret that as well.)
Is the purpose of further education solely to churn out "employees" ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY
Jesting aside, I have a surprisingly high tolerance level for the Butcher’s Apron, for a despicable, seditious Jock. For example, it is liberally displayed on 2 of our cars. I gave up frowning about them after a few years. I even quite like them on occasion. When I drive like an arsehole fellow motorists just blame ‘engelsmannen’.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1556195714224603137
It is entirely clear what it means.
"I wan't to be PM"
"I will be worse than BoZo at the job..."
Adding £x to Universal Credit, and other social security payments, is the way to ensure that the poorest can afford the energy price rises. Particularly as an amnesty for non-payment of bills does nothing to help those on prepayment meters.
1. The coming mass non-payment will not make everyone have a party with energy. They may choose to have the heating in when it is cold - but they would have done that anyway.
2. Why saddle individuals with huge debts that exclude them from society and thus consuming (and driving growth) with the huge cost of managing these debts, only to then write them off? Just write them off at the start.
I don't think you comprehend just how dreadful this winter is going to be.
Vote Tory for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out your life.
It might not be very exciting but there's a big market for that.
But it is nowhere near enough, and he seems to be saying "I have already committed a whole pile of cash, you should be thanking me". But the pledged sums are dwarfed by the coming increases...
If we can choose, that means a bias to Hong Kong and persecuted political dissidents against our enemies (Russian and the CCP) and oppressed Christians, I suspect.
Why? Because we think that's our duty and other nations a better fit for the rest.
As for who pays for it, that would be energy company shareholders. Sorry boys, companies make profits and they make losses. This winter they will make a loss. They could have mitigated against this coming loss by not paying the huge dividends they have just declared. Divis are supposed to be the cream on top when you have managed your business properly, not a guaranteed income for shareholders.
We need solutions that work with the market, not against it.
Genius plan.
@Bassaces1 I'm not saying Truss is a Tory Corbynite, but she exploits Tory fundamentalism that is similar to Corbynism in its paranoid worldview
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1556198951942062080
Nick was talking about "consumers and producers". Who else does that leave.
Stable boring government in the national interest isn't fun to do. Much more enjoyable to dream big dreams, march in and change everything. Show that you're in charge.
At some point, the Conservative Party decided it wasn't interested in being conservative any more. May was probably the last gasp of that tradition, and look what happened to her.
(And this does have a European dimension, of course it does. What some mock as EU sclerosis can also be read as setting an OK set of rules and letting business work using them because that's preferable to rules that change a lot in space and time. Boring government that sits in the background.)
Once that calculus changes the only way to prevent an attack is to convince the Chinese leadership to accept Taiwanese independence without war as preferable to Taiwanese independence after losing a war.
The deterrence to such an attack does not seem strong enough to prevent it.
We need to do all we can to prepare ourselves for this, but many months into Russia's war on Ukraine and we can't even agree to build more onshore wind turbines to replace Russian gas, nor have we accelerated investment for battery factories, etc.
We are squandering the opportunity to prepare for a crisis, to learn its impact on us.
Remember how this process works. I owe SSE £1,000. They sell this debt off to a debt collection company for £100 and write off the rest. So your proposal has a big corporate write off anyway - why not just do it up front? The government can give these companies a tax cut to make them feel ok about it.
But extraction costs haven't really changed.
It's basically just a straight arb for profit now
Remember - the 1997 onward increase in university numbers was designed to mask youth unemployment...
Worse is that the England team lay the wrong anthem. God Save The Queen is the UK national anthem. Home nations rightly have separate anthems - except England. So we get to here the dirge when it isn't even appropriate.
@johnestevens
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Liz Truss's reversal of NI hike would give a full-time worker on National Living Wage just £59, but someone on six figure salary would get more than £1,000, according to figures from Team Sunak
I guess it would be a way of nationalising the energy industry without having to pay to buy it.
At least we are saved the tragic display of England players not knowing the words to God Save the Queen...
Taiwan is de facto, but not de jure, independent.
There will be no de jure independence without a war.
Because, the Taiwanese, let alone the rest of the World don't want it, as it will lead to war. What is needed is for the status quo to work for both sides. Which it was before Xi came along. And still is, in reality.
https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/148813032645083136
If I can see that why can't Liz???
It'll be allowed once or twice and then the public will quickly lose patience as they've seen it all before.
Is it an easy job for Labour, no. But do they have a route to a majority still, yes
Soon as she is in No10 events will move fast and she will be reaching for the energy handouts to stop the rioting and the non-payment protests.
Blue, white and red are a great colour combination, as you can see in this great knitted shawl.
The flag has rotational symmetry, which is genius and distinctive. And it's way more interesting than the dull, dull, dull tricolours used by so many countries.
There will be widespread non-payment, whether deliberate or not.
So energy companies will need either support, or go under.
It is the reason their dividends were neither wise, nor free market. They were blackmail of the public purse.
Regardless of what either candidate says, or what they want to do, the govt will be offering further massive subsidies on energy this winter. It is simply inevitable.
In the short term of course more support for consumers would have to be funded by higher taxes if it is to avoid a rising deficit, which means you take with one hand and give with the other
If the Tories had shovelled money at them and invested in the industry in the 80s they might well have captured the Red Wall decades ago, and we might still have a domestic deep-mining industry providing coal to clean, CCS-equipped power stations. Giving us a large degree of energy security. With well-paid jobs for grateful miners and their communities. Ferrybridge C and Eggborough - the other two huge coal-fired, and now demolished, power stations along with Drax I grew up in the shadow of - would still be operational, providing more well-paid jobs locally.
An interesting counter-factual.
or uncooperative customers anyway. If we want a functioning energy supply for the next few years the government are subsidising a massive chunk of the increases (and the first set of subsidies only deals with the first of the increases, not the bigger subsequent ones). And we do want one, so that is what shall happen.
I don't understand why Truss thinks its sensible to deny this and do a u-turn later but her position will be reversed in time.
We can also decide collectively that we wish for those who are most able to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, and so we can mandate the government to tax those who can afford to pay more so that those who can't can still heat their homes. So the two hands you reference are acting as different points one the income and wealth scale.
Vote Starmer for stability, good governance and keeping politics boring & out of your life.