Can I just say that, from a professional perspective, Truss deciding to allow the City to do all the bad stuff from years ago which led to so many frauds and disasters, is absolutely wonderful news. Superb.
I and the colleagues I have trained will be inundated with work. That drama series I'm writing will go on and on and on.... A trickle-down of wealth to Cyclefree and friends. What could be better than that!
Become a financial investigator, folks. You'll never be out of work.
Shame that everyone else will be.
Do you need an apprentice who is an ex-teacher with a nose for bullshit and the ability to understand totally impenetrable documents?
My prediction is that Truss will turn out to be a lot better than many of us gave her credit for. Boris Johnson is a busted flush. He is yesterday's Clown; someone who achieved a great election victory against a ridiculously weedy opponent and managed very little else of note. His deranged supporters might want him back, but they will hopefully diminish in time, and before long it will be difficult to find anyone to admit they supported him.
I do wonder whether even he has fallen out of love with "Boris" as he always affectionately referred to him.
His posts do not indicate it so far, and I would be delighted if he would join those of us who want Truss to succeed and publicly accept Johnson is toxic and has damaged the party considerably
I support her as leader but she is still 10% behind on the latest poll and this end bankers' bonuses cap now was her decision not Boris'. She and Kwarteng own it
You demonstrate my point perfectly and until you condemn Johnson then you are part of his toxic legacy
Johnson may well have led the party to a less bad defeat than Truss will and led the party to its greatest victory since Thatcher. I will never condemn him
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican church is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches
Eh? That's a remarkable usage of the English language. The SEC is undoudtedly a different denomination from the C of E. Different prayer book, different finances, different location, and so on. It also follows the law of the land in allowing people of the same gender to marry. THe Archbish of Cantuar has nothing to do with that.
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
more a shot putt imho
I watched a huge meteor shower some time around 1997 or 1998, with a meteor visible every minute or so, and the most spectacular streak lasted about 30 seconds.
The UK Meteor Network reckon last night's object was manmade, space debris.
The latest polls show Truss has not got much bounce at all relative to what the Tories were polling under Johnson.
Now she has made some good moves on cost of living and acted like a stateswoman after the Queen's death.
However the decision of Truss and Kwarteng to end the cap on bankers' bonuses at a time of cost of living crisis and with a big deficit is politically tin eared even if economically there is the argument it will attract talent to the City and boost revenues longer term. It might go down well in the City of London and Home counties but it will not help Truss at all to retain the redwall. It is a further sign her government will be a more economically libertarian one than Boris' was
Taking more tax revenue from the City, and less tax revenue from the income of ordinary people, should go down a storm in the Red Wall. RW voters are not obsessed by the politics of envy, they just want their own taxes to come down.
You are projecting your own values @Sandpit. As you are, I believe, an ex-pat living in the Gulf I'm going to hazard a guess that money, and in particular low taxes, are important to you.
Of course, if asked, RW voters are going to say they'd like to see their own taxes reduced. But I think all the polling evidence says that's not as important to them controlling energy prices and the CoL, improving health services, investing in their local economies, improving local services, improving schools.
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
I’m on Boris next Con leader at 16/1. I think he should be clear favourite, ~4/1 or so.
Not big stakes, and I’m not loading up more at the current price because his intentions aren’t clear and I dislike tying up too much money on long term markets, especially with a small, young company like smarkets and especially especially with inflation at 10%.
If Truss is a disaster, we'll know in months. And if so, there will be a grovelling group of men in grey suits begging Wallace to take over in a coronation.
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
Growth has been slow in every Western country (compared to the 1950-2000 period) for at least a generation, apart from the commodity producers. If governments could pull a lever, and restore pre-2000 growth rates, they would do so.
Apparently all you have to do is make bankers richer and trickle down will take care of the rest. of the financial sector
I see British Cycling are rivalling Center Parcs for the most strangest advice to their customers . Nobody should cycle on Monday !
Really? Well, I never pay the slightest attention to them on anything anyway.
Have the AA and RAC advised people not to drive? Or do their board members have brains in their heads?
after much mocking they have U-turned (or changed gear?) and withdrawn the "strong recommendation" but still say amateur clubs should not meet for a cycle! I think a lot of these type of bodies get to think they actually own cycling or can actually tell people what to do in their time off
The latest polls show Truss has not got much bounce at all relative to what the Tories were polling under Johnson.
Now she has made some good moves on cost of living and acted like a stateswoman after the Queen's death.
However the decision of Truss and Kwarteng to end the cap on bankers' bonuses at a time of cost of living crisis and with a big deficit is politically tin eared even if economically there is the argument it will attract talent to the City and boost revenues longer term. It might go down well in the City of London and Home counties but it will not help Truss at all to retain the redwall. It is a further sign her government will be a more economically libertarian one than Boris' was
Taking more tax revenue from the City, and less tax revenue from the income of ordinary people, should go down a storm in the Red Wall. RW voters are not obsessed by the politics of envy, they just want their own taxes to come down.
You are projecting your own values @Sandpit. As you are, I believe, an ex-pat living in the Gulf I'm going to hazard a guess that money, and in particular low taxes, are important to you.
Of course, if asked, RW voters are going to say they'd like to see their own taxes reduced. But I think all the polling evidence says that's not as important to them controlling energy prices and the CoL, improving health services, investing in their local economies, improving local services, improving schools.
All things which get better the more higher-earners there are in the country, earning as much as possible and paying taxes.
It’s one of the few things on which Blair was correct. The government should be relaxed about people getting rich, so long as they pay their taxes.
If the UK attracts thousands more bankers (or footballers), and they all pay six or seven figures in tax every year, then there’s a discussion to be had about whether that money can be invested in public services or tax cuts for ordinary people. But we all need to agree that the more high-earners, the better for the country and the government’s books.
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
I’m on Boris next Con leader at 16/1. I think he should be clear favourite, ~4/1 or so.
Not big stakes, and I’m not loading up more at the current price because his intentions aren’t clear and I dislike tying up too much money on long term markets, especially with a small, young company like smarkets and especially especially with inflation at 10%.
If Truss is a disaster, we'll know in months. And if so, there will be a grovelling group of men in grey suits begging Wallace to take over in a coronation.
If there's no help and at least a 10% boost to benefits, the first sigh of that will be as soon as next week. As even essentially Tory organisations like the Legatum Institute and Resolution Foundation now say, without that there's a social disaster on the way.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican communion is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches.
We went to a Church of Ireland service last week which was virtually identical to our Church of England services except absent mention of the monarch, even if prayers for the late Queen at the end.
It is nothing like the UK and US which are completely separate countries
But the UK and Australia are in the Commonwealth, and have the same ceremonial head of state, yet are different countrues. That is the situation with the SEC and the C of E, except that the SEC's origins have nothing to do with the C of E. A better comparison would be one of the new members of the Commonwealth which have nothing to do historically with the British Empire, actually.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
The Ukrainian navy is tiny, the US Coastguard is bigger and more heavily armed.
Compared to the Russian Navy the Ukrainian had next to nothing. The Ukrainian military have comprehensively defeated the Russian Black Sea fleet, nonetheless.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
…the UK and US which are completely separate countries
I’m on Boris next Con leader at 16/1. I think he should be clear favourite, ~4/1 or so.
Not big stakes, and I’m not loading up more at the current price because his intentions aren’t clear and I dislike tying up too much money on long term markets, especially with a small, young company like smarkets and especially especially with inflation at 10%.
I'm not with you on this one. I struggle to see any scenario where the MPs would give sufficient support to put him in the final two.
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
UK 10y yields were under 4% when Brown left office. That does not look like a sovereign debt crisis to me. Greek yields peaked at over 30%. That is what a sovereign debt crisis looks like.
"Not as bad as the Greeks" - your claim that all is OK with Brown.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
It is. This kind of thing happens anywhere you're trapped for a long time. I was in A&E for 7 hours a couple of weeks ago (was supposed to be a direct emergency admission, but the ward was full, so I and several others were dumped in the ED to wait).
Two strangers became, I'm pretty sure, a couple (they certainly swapped numbers). I got chatting to an elderly Welsh guy who, it turned out, went to school with one of my former bosses (professor, now dead). There was a weird noise every few minutes for about half an hour, which turned out to be santiser dispenser hidden behind a lady sitting on a chair (she ended up with a coat covered down the back in hand sanitiser). We swapped tales of waits, then and in the past. We compared notes on the biscuits available.
While in hospital a few years ago after surgery I made friends with an old guy who was, like me, a Swindon supporter. Great to reminisce over football as far back as the 80's with someone who has seen it too.
I’m on Boris next Con leader at 16/1. I think he should be clear favourite, ~4/1 or so.
Not big stakes, and I’m not loading up more at the current price because his intentions aren’t clear and I dislike tying up too much money on long term markets, especially with a small, young company like smarkets and especially especially with inflation at 10%.
I'm not with you on this one. I struggle to see any scenario where the MPs would give sufficient support to put him in the final two.
That's easy. Boris will get the call if, and only if, Truss craters and polls show Boris as the only Tory to beat Starmer at the election.
My prediction is that Truss will turn out to be a lot better than many of us gave her credit for. Boris Johnson is a busted flush. He is yesterday's Clown; someone who achieved a great election victory against a ridiculously weedy opponent and managed very little else of note. His deranged supporters might want him back, but they will hopefully diminish in time, and before long it will be difficult to find anyone to admit they supported him.
I do wonder whether even he has fallen out of love with "Boris" as he always affectionately referred to him.
Everyone falls out of love with Boris in the end, as some people have been predicting for what feels like ages.
(To be fair to our Epping Correspondent, he has a reasonable point. Even if you think Johnson was a bad Prime Minister who should never have been let near the job, it's foolish to deny his talents. Like with Mr Ripley.
There is a chunk of the electorate who voted for Boris. Not the Conservatives, Boris. A lot of them will be lost to the Conservatives now that Boris is gone. Ditching the old flubber was the right thing to do, but it's silly to pretend it's going to be cost-free.
Still, the free-market purists have got all the handles of the party and the government for the next couple of years. Let's see how they do, having hacked away the Cameroons, fiscally responsible Mayite traditionalists and Johnsonites. There's not much left, it has to be said.)
Because of first the partial surprise of the energy announcement, and then immediately after, the Queen's passing, there's been incredibly little coverage of just how much this month's change in the energy prices alone, from the current level to next month's, where they will be set, is going to affect thousands, possibly millions of people.
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
UK 10y yields were under 4% when Brown left office. That does not look like a sovereign debt crisis to me. Greek yields peaked at over 30%. That is what a sovereign debt crisis looks like.
"Not as bad as the Greeks" - your claim that all is OK with Brown.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
How long do you think we should give the Tories to fix the mess Brown left? 12 years is obviously not enough.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican church is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches
Eh? That's a remarkable usage of the English language. The SEC is undoudtedly a different denomination from the C of E. Different prayer book, different finances, different location, and so on. It also follows the law of the land in allowing people of the same gender to marry. THe Archbish of Cantuar has nothing to do with that.
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
No it isn't, the SEP ceremonial leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury for starters. The SEP Prayer book is little different to the BCP in format. The fact it allows some priests personal choice as to whether to conduct gay blessings or not doesn't change that
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
UK 10y yields were under 4% when Brown left office. That does not look like a sovereign debt crisis to me. Greek yields peaked at over 30%. That is what a sovereign debt crisis looks like.
"Not as bad as the Greeks" - your claim that all is OK with Brown.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
How long do you think we should give the Tories to fix the mess Brown left? 12 years is obviously not enough.
20 years? 50?
Well it took Brown 13 years to make the mess in the first place.
The Tories pre-pandemic had 9 years of growth to reverse 13 years of damage, and were nearly done fixing his mess though now there's Covid/Russia etc to deal with too of course.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican communion is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches.
We went to a Church of Ireland service last week which was virtually identical to our Church of England services except absent mention of the monarch, even if prayers for the late Queen at the end.
It is nothing like the UK and US which are completely separate countries
But the UK and Australia are in the Commonwealth, and have the same ceremonial head of state, yet are different countrues. That is the situation with the SEC and the C of E, except that the SEC's origins have nothing to do with the C of E. A better comparison would be one of the new members of the Commonwealth which have nothing to do historically with the British Empire, actually.
Both the UK and Australia are commonwealth realms, the US isn't.
The new Commonwealth members aren't Commonwealth realms either
BBC reporting on DPRK (North Korea) overlaid on queen funeral procession
John Simpson (it was he?) sounds not entirely dissimilar to David Attenborough. There's probably scope for doing something similar with commentary from one of the BBC nature series. Or certainly for a montage of clips from the fall of Boris and the elevation of Liz (T). "At last, defeated, he retires to lick his wounds. The victor now takes the spoils and the rest of the group subjugate themselves - if they do not, retribution will be instant and merciless"
I’m on Boris next Con leader at 16/1. I think he should be clear favourite, ~4/1 or so.
Not big stakes, and I’m not loading up more at the current price because his intentions aren’t clear and I dislike tying up too much money on long term markets, especially with a small, young company like smarkets and especially especially with inflation at 10%.
If Truss is a disaster, we'll know in months. And if so, there will be a grovelling group of men in grey suits begging Wallace to take over in a coronation.
Brenda from Bristol says - "You're joking, not another Coronation!".
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
Yes.
Thanks in no small part to what is now a much smaller Russian navy.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
The man on the street in the UK felt it most keenly because our financial institutions had a vulnerable business model and we know who changed the regulatory oversight regime for financial institutions, now, don't we.
Northern Rock wasn't based in Arkansas.
And what inspired the change in the business model ? The kind of thinking coming from the right of the Tory party.
Actually the Tories specifically warned Brown about the risks he was taking, warnings that came prophetically true.
Osborne was literally giving speeches saying that Labour weren't going far *enough* in deregulating just before Northern Rock
And he was right.
Box ticking "regulations" that Brown flooded people with achieve nothing apart from providing jobs to box tickers that then take the intelligence and foresight out of the discussion.
What was needed, was instead what we had pre-Brown which is smarter regulations, not more regulations. The Bank of England having oversight and responsibility for the sector, rather than tripartite division of regulations with nobody taking responsibility.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
They’re already leaving, one ship at a time. Starting with the flagship Москва, now a Ukranian underwater cultural artifact on the bottom of the Black Sea.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican church is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches
Eh? That's a remarkable usage of the English language. The SEC is undoudtedly a different denomination from the C of E. Different prayer book, different finances, different location, and so on. It also follows the law of the land in allowing people of the same gender to marry. THe Archbish of Cantuar has nothing to do with that.
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
No it isn't, the SEP ceremonial leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury for starters. The SEP Prayer book is little different to the BCP in format. The fact it allows some priests personal choice as to whether to conduct gay blessings or not doesn't change that
Do the numbers of English angels and Scottish angels that can dance on the head of a pin differ?
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
UK 10y yields were under 4% when Brown left office. That does not look like a sovereign debt crisis to me. Greek yields peaked at over 30%. That is what a sovereign debt crisis looks like.
"Not as bad as the Greeks" - your claim that all is OK with Brown.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
How long do you think we should give the Tories to fix the mess Brown left? 12 years is obviously not enough.
20 years? 50?
Well it took Brown 13 years to make the mess in the first place.
The Tories pre-pandemic had 9 years of growth to reverse 13 years of damage, and were nearly done fixing his mess though now there's Covid/Russia etc to deal with too of course.
Taking the he said/she said politics out of it, the problem both main parties face is that the average person feels no wealthier than they did in 2008 because….. they aren’t.
There are competing theories for why this is, but the Tories certainly never created a real “feel good factor” like the late 90s, early 2000s, or bits of the 80s.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
Moscow, taking out the deluded dictator in charge.
Because of first the partial surprise of the energy announcement, and then immediately after, the Queen's passing, there's been incredibly little coverage of just how much this month's change in the energy prices alone, from the current level to next month's, where they will be set, is going to affect thousands, possibly millions of people.
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
Hmm, I'd understood the energy price cap, on the "typical user" stat was going from £2000 to £2500. So, an 80% mooted rise had turned into a 25% rise.
Just looked at the unit prices compared with current, on a capped rate:
Electricity: 26.05p to 34p per kWh = 30% Gas: 6.93p to 10.3p = 48%
What gives? Is the 25% typical increase what the position will be AFTER the Rishi rebates are accounted for, or is my maths out??
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican church is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches
Eh? That's a remarkable usage of the English language. The SEC is undoudtedly a different denomination from the C of E. Different prayer book, different finances, different location, and so on. It also follows the law of the land in allowing people of the same gender to marry. THe Archbish of Cantuar has nothing to do with that.
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
No it isn't, the SEP ceremonial leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury for starters. The SEP Prayer book is little different to the BCP in format. The fact it allows some priests personal choice as to whether to conduct gay blessings or not doesn't change that
Do the numbers of English angels and Scottish angels that can dance on the head of a pin differ?
Dunno about the numbers, but they are certainly in different heavenly hosts as fiar as discipline is concerned:
"It is [...] a common fault to refer to the Episcopal Church as the ‘English’ Church, whereas the Scottish Episcopal Church is entirely independent from the Church of England in its government, liturgies, and in the election of its bishops etc. it is, however, in full communion with the Church of England, as is the Church in Wales, the Church of Ireland and all the other members of the Anglican Communion (such as the Anglican Church in Japan or in Southern Africa)."
"From 1690, therefore, the Bishops and those who supported them, were forced out of the Church of Scotland: thus was the Scottish Episcopal Church born, and it has continued as a separate body ever since."
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
UK 10y yields were under 4% when Brown left office. That does not look like a sovereign debt crisis to me. Greek yields peaked at over 30%. That is what a sovereign debt crisis looks like.
"Not as bad as the Greeks" - your claim that all is OK with Brown.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
How long do you think we should give the Tories to fix the mess Brown left? 12 years is obviously not enough.
20 years? 50?
Well it took Brown 13 years to make the mess in the first place.
The Tories pre-pandemic had 9 years of growth to reverse 13 years of damage, and were nearly done fixing his mess though now there's Covid/Russia etc to deal with too of course.
That marks Brown out as one of our finest ever politicians, surely? Not many politicians take 13 years to make a big mess.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
Sochi? Assuming that's where Putin is. Would definitely improve their long term position.
Underrated IMHO. Johnson is an election winner and could easily come back if, as I predict, Truss becomes extremely unpopular. She is in the process of blowing up the electoral coalition Johnson assembled. Does Truss have the nous to make sure Johnson's political future is destroyed by the privileges investigation? I doubt it.
Johnson was an election winner. He is now toxic and the primary reason behind the Labour poll leads we see now. The Tories have done their leader change this Parliament, there is no road left for them to travel other than to roll the dice with Liz and hope.
So toxic that if he had been in the run off in this Tory leadership election he would have won it.
The Labour Party are loving the fact Boris is out of the way.
Toxic with the general population; not toxic with the rather unrepresentative Tory membership.
If you cannot see the difference there you might as well give up.
That’s rather combative post from you. you want some eh, come on 😆
But you are just plain wrong Ben.
Let’s take a look at the stats - party gate plunged Boris a lot, but they were swinging back in the right direction over time were they not? Are you saying for certain Boris would have lost the next election? I don’t think anyone can say that for certain can they - it’s for that reason I say you are plain wrong if you claim for certain he would have got a bad result against Starmer’s Labour.
The latest polls show Truss has not got much bounce at all relative to what the Tories were polling under Johnson.
Now she has made some good moves on cost of living and acted like a stateswoman after the Queen's death.
However the decision of Truss and Kwarteng to end the cap on bankers' bonuses at a time of cost of living crisis and with a big deficit is politically tin eared even if economically there is the argument it will attract talent to the City and boost revenues longer term. It might go down well in the City of London and Home counties but it will not help Truss at all to retain the redwall. It is a further sign her government will be a more economically libertarian one than Boris' was
I’m fascinated as to what not acting like a stateswoman would have been…
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
UK 10y yields were under 4% when Brown left office. That does not look like a sovereign debt crisis to me. Greek yields peaked at over 30%. That is what a sovereign debt crisis looks like.
"Not as bad as the Greeks" - your claim that all is OK with Brown.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
How long do you think we should give the Tories to fix the mess Brown left? 12 years is obviously not enough.
20 years? 50?
Well it took Brown 13 years to make the mess in the first place.
The Tories pre-pandemic had 9 years of growth to reverse 13 years of damage, and were nearly done fixing his mess though now there's Covid/Russia etc to deal with too of course.
Taking the he said/she said politics out of it, the problem both main parties face is that the average person feels no wealthier than they did in 2008 because….. they aren’t.
There are competing theories for why this is, but the Tories certainly never created a real “feel good factor” like the late 90s, early 2000s, or bits of the 80s.
Is this always true thought? Many people progress in careers, and since 2008 many will have changed jobs, or got promoted etc. Not everyone does the same job for their whole careers. Sure if you are in the same job as 2008, its likely you may not feel better off, but you could look for promotion, new job (great market right now) and you did at least survive a 1 in 100 year pandemic.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican church is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches
Eh? That's a remarkable usage of the English language. The SEC is undoudtedly a different denomination from the C of E. Different prayer book, different finances, different location, and so on. It also follows the law of the land in allowing people of the same gender to marry. THe Archbish of Cantuar has nothing to do with that.
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
No it isn't, the SEP ceremonial leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury for starters. The SEP Prayer book is little different to the BCP in format. The fact it allows some priests personal choice as to whether to conduct gay blessings or not doesn't change that
Do the numbers of English angels and Scottish angels that can dance on the head of a pin differ?
I have an instinctive feeling that (presumably) morris dancing English angels might be more space efficient than Scottish angels enjoying a ceilidh. At least, based on my experience of ceilidhs, you need a fair bit of space. I lack direct experience of morris dancing
On the radio I heard an interesting tip for @Casino_Royale or anyone else going into the queen queue, especially at night. Take a pack or to of small individually-wrapped chocolates, such as Heroes or eclairs. Eat them slowly over the night to keep your energy up, and offer some to the volunteers along the route.
It hadn't occurred to me that there would be volunteers on the route, but it makes sense.
My prediction is that Truss will turn out to be a lot better than many of us gave her credit for. Boris Johnson is a busted flush. He is yesterday's Clown; someone who achieved a great election victory against a ridiculously weedy opponent and managed very little else of note. His deranged supporters might want him back, but they will hopefully diminish in time, and before long it will be difficult to find anyone to admit they supported him.
I do wonder whether even he has fallen out of love with "Boris" as he always affectionately referred to him.
His posts do not indicate it so far, and I would be delighted if he would join those of us who want Truss to succeed and publicly accept Johnson is toxic and has damaged the party considerably
I support her as leader but she is still 10% behind on the latest poll and this end bankers' bonuses cap now was her decision not Boris'. She and Kwarteng own it
You demonstrate my point perfectly and until you condemn Johnson then you are part of his toxic legacy
I won't condemn the party's most successful leader since Thatcher
Leaving aside the question as to whether he was more successful than either Cameron or Major, looking at the rest of them that isn't exactly a high bar, is it?
Interesting that @HYUFD describes Johnson as "the party's most successful leader since Thatcher". This is a totally ridiculous proposition. He bases "most successful" solely on his election victory over Jeremy fecking Corbyn.
Johnson was responsible for one of the biggest fissures in the Tory Party since the Corn Laws. He became an international laughing stock. He thoroughly trashed the Conservative Party's reputation for sensible governance and found himself heaved out of No10 after only 3 years for dishonesty. Other than TMay you have to go back to 1827 to find a PM with a shorter tenure. He was hopeless. A bad joke. A man totally unfit for office. He was not successful, except in his ability to trounce the most ludicrous LoTO ever to have held that role, and to gull those foolish enough like @HYUFD into thinking he was appropriate to be Party leader and PM.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
You don't believe in nukes as a deterrent then? Kiev? NATO capital cities? Cue escalation with mega-destruction and large losses on both sides.
Losing Sevastopol completely so that a Ukraine in NATO could welcome in the US navy (and screw the Montreux convention) would mark a major change in the balance of power.
What's the scenario for Russia being forced to cede Sevastopol without reaching for the nukes and hello WW3? That's what I'd like to know.
This could be an interesting discussion. Sevastopol is a much bigger prize than the Donbas.
Underrated IMHO. Johnson is an election winner and could easily come back if, as I predict, Truss becomes extremely unpopular. She is in the process of blowing up the electoral coalition Johnson assembled. Does Truss have the nous to make sure Johnson's political future is destroyed by the privileges investigation? I doubt it.
Johnson was an election winner. He is now toxic and the primary reason behind the Labour poll leads we see now. The Tories have done their leader change this Parliament, there is no road left for them to travel other than to roll the dice with Liz and hope.
So toxic that if he had been in the run off in this Tory leadership election he would have won it.
The Labour Party are loving the fact Boris is out of the way.
Toxic with the general population; not toxic with the rather unrepresentative Tory membership.
If you cannot see the difference there you might as well give up.
That’s rather combative post from you. you want some eh, come on 😆
But you are just plain wrong Ben.
Let’s take a look at the stats - party gate plunged Boris a lot, but they were swinging back in the right direction over time were they not? Are you saying for certain Boris would have lost the next election? I don’t think anyone can say that for certain can they - it’s for that reason I say you are plain wrong if you claim for certain he would have got a bad result against Starmer’s Labour.
Your erroneous counterfactual there is, What if Boris stayed on and behaved himself and nothing dreadful he had already done came out and he didn't do any new dreadful things, and the Privcom gave him a clean bill of health. see how unlikely that is?
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
You don't believe in nukes as a deterrent then? Kiev? NATO capital cities? Cue escalation with mega-destruction and large losses on both sides.
Losing Sevastopol completely so that a Ukraine in NATO could welcome in the US navy (and screw the Montreux convention) would mark a major change in the balance of power.
What's the scenario for Russia being forced to cede Sevastopol without reaching for the nukes and hello WW3? That's what I'd like to know.
This could be an interesting discussion. Sevastopol is a much bigger prize than the Donbas.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
Stop scaremongering, you just make yourself look like a Putin paid troll.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
The most likely place for Russia to explode a nuclear bomb, is in its own silo. They’ve all been sitting there for decades, with not enough maintainence except for pilfering of the valuable materials.
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
The man on the street in the UK felt it most keenly because our financial institutions had a vulnerable business model and we know who changed the regulatory oversight regime for financial institutions, now, don't we.
Northern Rock wasn't based in Arkansas.
And what inspired the change in the business model ? The kind of thinking coming from the right of the Tory party.
Actually the Tories specifically warned Brown about the risks he was taking, warnings that came prophetically true.
Osborne was literally giving speeches saying that Labour weren't going far *enough* in deregulating just before Northern Rock
And he was right.
Box ticking "regulations" that Brown flooded people with achieve nothing apart from providing jobs to box tickers that then take the intelligence and foresight out of the discussion.
What was needed, was instead what we had pre-Brown which is smarter regulations, not more regulations. The Bank of England having oversight and responsibility for the sector, rather than tripartite division of regulations with nobody taking responsibility.
Excessive regulation also gives investors a false sense of security ie the notion that investments are 'safe' when they may be nothing of the sort. The (sub)prime example being US mortgage bonds.
Plus: Big players use regulation as a barrier to prevent smarter, leaner new entrants into a market. The market in this case being banking.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
You don't believe in nukes as a deterrent then? Kiev? NATO capital cities? Cue escalation with mega-destruction and large losses on both sides.
Losing Sevastopol completely so that a Ukraine in NATO could welcome in the US navy (and screw the Montreux convention) would mark a major change in the balance of power.
What's the scenario for Russia being forced to cede Sevastopol without reaching for the nukes and hello WW3? That's what I'd like to know.
This could be an interesting discussion. Sevastopol is a much bigger prize than the Donbas.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
Stop scaremongering, you just make yourself look like a Putin paid troll.
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
Yes it is, the global Anglican church is a denomination no different to the global Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church etc and also more aligned than say Baptist or Pentecostal churches
Eh? That's a remarkable usage of the English language. The SEC is undoudtedly a different denomination from the C of E. Different prayer book, different finances, different location, and so on. It also follows the law of the land in allowing people of the same gender to marry. THe Archbish of Cantuar has nothing to do with that.
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
No it isn't, the SEP ceremonial leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury for starters. The SEP Prayer book is little different to the BCP in format. The fact it allows some priests personal choice as to whether to conduct gay blessings or not doesn't change that
Do the numbers of English angels and Scottish angels that can dance on the head of a pin differ?
Dunno about the numbers, but they are certainly in different heavenly hosts as fiar as discipline is concerned:
"It is [...] a common fault to refer to the Episcopal Church as the ‘English’ Church, whereas the Scottish Episcopal Church is entirely independent from the Church of England in its government, liturgies, and in the election of its bishops etc. it is, however, in full communion with the Church of England, as is the Church in Wales, the Church of Ireland and all the other members of the Anglican Communion (such as the Anglican Church in Japan or in Southern Africa)."
"From 1690, therefore, the Bishops and those who supported them, were forced out of the Church of Scotland: thus was the Scottish Episcopal Church born, and it has continued as a separate body ever since."
Pics at the top of this never get old. Interesting thread.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1570169288849326082 Did a culture of institutionalised lying contribute to Russia's recent disaster east of Kharkiv, by giving its senior commanders a distorted and false picture of the true situation on the ground? A 🧵 reviewing the evidence... While reading Russian soldiers' personal accounts from published intercepted phone calls and personal accounts, I've seen one point mentioned repeatedly: Russian army officers frequently lie to their superiors about their unit's status...
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
The man on the street in the UK felt it most keenly because our financial institutions had a vulnerable business model and we know who changed the regulatory oversight regime for financial institutions, now, don't we.
Northern Rock wasn't based in Arkansas.
And what inspired the change in the business model ? The kind of thinking coming from the right of the Tory party.
Actually the Tories specifically warned Brown about the risks he was taking, warnings that came prophetically true.
Osborne was literally giving speeches saying that Labour weren't going far *enough* in deregulating just before Northern Rock
And he was right.
Box ticking "regulations" that Brown flooded people with achieve nothing apart from providing jobs to box tickers that then take the intelligence and foresight out of the discussion.
What was needed, was instead what we had pre-Brown which is smarter regulations, not more regulations. The Bank of England having oversight and responsibility for the sector, rather than tripartite division of regulations with nobody taking responsibility.
Excessive regulation also gives investors a false sense of security ie the notion that investments are 'safe' when they may be nothing of the sort. The (sub)prime example being US mortgage bonds.
Plus: Big players use regulation as a barrier to prevent smarter, leaner new entrants into a market. The market in this case being banking.
Exactly. Its worth conflating the two issues being discussed, what went wrong with banking, and what is going wrong with Russia's military, and the common thread between the two is excessive reliance upon box ticking.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1570170497232404480 32/ There likely isn't a single reason why this is happening. It's most likely a combination of institutional corruption (see threads below ⬇️), an emphasis on box-ticking rather than genuine achievement, and unwillingness to report bad news up the chain.
Honesty, integrity and oversight matter. Box ticking without them is just counterproductive and can even be abused to circumvent proper protections.
On the radio I heard an interesting tip for @Casino_Royale or anyone else going into the queen queue, especially at night. Take a pack or to of small individually-wrapped chocolates, such as Heroes or eclairs. Eat them slowly over the night to keep your energy up, and offer some to the volunteers along the route.
It hadn't occurred to me that there would be volunteers on the route, but it makes sense.
Hundreds of them according to the Beeb. And 500 loos and provision for hot drinks. And the means to leave the Queue for food and rest breaks and return through a system of wristbands. The British sure do know how to queue.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
My prediction is that Truss will turn out to be a lot better than many of us gave her credit for. Boris Johnson is a busted flush. He is yesterday's Clown; someone who achieved a great election victory against a ridiculously weedy opponent and managed very little else of note. His deranged supporters might want him back, but they will hopefully diminish in time, and before long it will be difficult to find anyone to admit they supported him.
I do wonder whether even he has fallen out of love with "Boris" as he always affectionately referred to him.
His posts do not indicate it so far, and I would be delighted if he would join those of us who want Truss to succeed and publicly accept Johnson is toxic and has damaged the party considerably
I support her as leader but she is still 10% behind on the latest poll and this end bankers' bonuses cap now was her decision not Boris'. She and Kwarteng own it
You demonstrate my point perfectly and until you condemn Johnson then you are part of his toxic legacy
I won't condemn the party's most successful leader since Thatcher
Leaving aside the question as to whether he was more successful than either Cameron or Major, looking at the rest of them that isn't exactly a high bar, is it?
Interesting that @HYUFD describes Johnson as "the party's most successful leader since Thatcher". This is a totally ridiculous proposition. He bases "most successful" solely on his election victory over Jeremy fecking Corbyn.
Johnson was responsible for one of the biggest fissures in the Tory Party since the Corn Laws. He became an international laughing stock. He thoroughly trashed the Conservative Party's reputation for sensible governance and found himself heaved out of No10 after only 3 years for dishonesty. Other than TMay you have to go back to 1827 to find a PM with a shorter tenure. He was hopeless. A bad joke. A man totally unfit for office. He was not successful, except in his ability to trounce the most ludicrous LoTO ever to have held that role, and to gull those foolish enough like @HYUFD into thinking he was appropriate to be Party leader and PM.
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
Like HY and unlike Leon, I am a big traditionalist at heart - so instead of calling it a UFO I am calling it a dragon. They come from out the void and hide underneath the hill because before banks everyone used to bury their wealth and treasure and dragons love treasure.
The only other explanation is the importance of portents - if you are going to tell the bee’s the master is dead (just smacks of politeness to me but different if you truly superstitious) then what about signs in the sky, leaky pens - OMG 🫣
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
Give it a few months and they’ll have a much bigger one. Based out of Sevastopol.
They were at Sevastopol until 2014, alongside the much bigger Russian navy. Can you see the Russian navy leaving Sevastopol without the war turning nuclear?
What target would Russia nuke and how would it improve their strategic position?
You don't believe in nukes as a deterrent then? Kiev? NATO capital cities? Cue escalation with mega-destruction and large losses on both sides.
Losing Sevastopol completely so that a Ukraine in NATO could welcome in the US navy (and screw the Montreux convention) would mark a major change in the balance of power.
What's the scenario for Russia being forced to cede Sevastopol without reaching for the nukes and hello WW3? That's what I'd like to know.
This could be an interesting discussion. Sevastopol is a much bigger prize than the Donbas.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
Stop scaremongering, you just make yourself look like a Putin paid troll.
The future status of Sevastopol is nonetheless an interesting point, as is indeed the future for the whole of Crimea. It will be one of the most difficult issues to sort out postwar, from the point of view of long term stability.
But I don't think it's anywhere near the top of the list for Ukraine's current planning. And the idea of discussing it now with Dynamo Moscow is just silly.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
The Ukrainian navy is tiny, the US Coastguard is bigger and more heavily armed.
Compared to the Russian Navy the Ukrainian had next to nothing. The Ukrainian military have comprehensively defeated the Russian Black Sea fleet, nonetheless.
Although I've argued in support of the tanks future on here, it's interesting that the three main "traditional" signifiers of military force - naval vessels, fixed-wing aircraft, main battle tanks - are all areas where you'd have thought that Russia has a large advantage over Ukraine, but somehow they've come to nothing.
Most people are explaining this by saying that it's the Russian ships that are crap, their pilots don't have sufficient training, and corruption has left tanks without functioning reactive armour - but it's possible that large surface ships, fast jets and tanks are all obsolete, due essentially to various types of missiles.
I hope the experts are having a good think, and trying to work out what the answer is. Damned if I know for sure.
Pics at the top of this never get old. Interesting thread.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1570169288849326082 Did a culture of institutionalised lying contribute to Russia's recent disaster east of Kharkiv, by giving its senior commanders a distorted and false picture of the true situation on the ground? A 🧵 reviewing the evidence... While reading Russian soldiers' personal accounts from published intercepted phone calls and personal accounts, I've seen one point mentioned repeatedly: Russian army officers frequently lie to their superiors about their unit's status...
That chimes very interestingly with the Royal carryings on this week. Just as it turns out there is a real and entirely contemporary point behind the "Q is dead long live the K" stuff, so this is why intelligent monarchs inspect their troops on parade. Sure it's ceremonial now but the point is: this is TOO IMPORTANT to take the word of the generals for, you get out there and see for yourself.
This was Saddam's downfall: if he hadheld WMD inspections regularly, there would actually have been WMDs.
Underrated IMHO. Johnson is an election winner and could easily come back if, as I predict, Truss becomes extremely unpopular. She is in the process of blowing up the electoral coalition Johnson assembled. Does Truss have the nous to make sure Johnson's political future is destroyed by the privileges investigation? I doubt it.
Johnson was an election winner. He is now toxic and the primary reason behind the Labour poll leads we see now. The Tories have done their leader change this Parliament, there is no road left for them to travel other than to roll the dice with Liz and hope.
So toxic that if he had been in the run off in this Tory leadership election he would have won it.
The Labour Party are loving the fact Boris is out of the way.
Toxic with the general population; not toxic with the rather unrepresentative Tory membership.
If you cannot see the difference there you might as well give up.
That’s rather combative post from you. you want some eh, come on 😆
But you are just plain wrong Ben.
Let’s take a look at the stats - party gate plunged Boris a lot, but they were swinging back in the right direction over time were they not? Are you saying for certain Boris would have lost the next election? I don’t think anyone can say that for certain can they - it’s for that reason I say you are plain wrong if you claim for certain he would have got a bad result against Starmer’s Labour.
Losing the argument, you change the parameters.
Of course I'm not saying for certain Johnson would have lost the next election; I'm saying that Johnson's undisputed popularity with Tory members does not mean he isn't toxic with the general population.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
It was an opinion based on information I have read from reliable sources, so no, I don't know "the fuck" know it for a fact. What I do know the fuck for a fact is that you give opinion as though you were once a fucking admiral of the fucking Fleet, when I guess you were probably a fucking midshipman, and you have been fucking wrong on fucking everything, so I do wish you would shut the fuck up.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
A full scale mobilisation is too little, too late now.
Russia's so-called "elite" military units have been smashed and their equipment donated to Ukrainian forces.
How long is it going to take to mobilise untrained conscripts and send them into the theatre of war? And what are they going to be equipped with.
The age of simply throwing bodies into a conflict and winning via sheer weight of numbers is long since over. You need logistics to win wars nowadays, and Russia doesn't have it.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
Serious question: would all out mobilisation help the Russian wear effort much? Is so, how?
Because of first the partial surprise of the energy announcement, and then immediately after, the Queen's passing, there's been incredibly little coverage of just how much this month's change in the energy prices alone, from the current level to next month's, where they will be set, is going to affect thousands, possibly millions of people.
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
Hmm, I'd understood the energy price cap, on the "typical user" stat was going from £2000 to £2500. So, an 80% mooted rise had turned into a 25% rise.
Just looked at the unit prices compared with current, on a capped rate:
Electricity: 26.05p to 34p per kWh = 30% Gas: 6.93p to 10.3p = 48%
What gives? Is the 25% typical increase what the position will be AFTER the Rishi rebates are accounted for, or is my maths out??
The total bill will also include the daily standing charge, and I think, to their credit, that the government's reductions have been greater in the standing charge than on the unit rate. (I haven't checked the details, but I think this is what I saw, and it would explain the discrepancy).
My prediction is that Truss will turn out to be a lot better than many of us gave her credit for. Boris Johnson is a busted flush. He is yesterday's Clown; someone who achieved a great election victory against a ridiculously weedy opponent and managed very little else of note. His deranged supporters might want him back, but they will hopefully diminish in time, and before long it will be difficult to find anyone to admit they supported him.
I do wonder whether even he has fallen out of love with "Boris" as he always affectionately referred to him.
His posts do not indicate it so far, and I would be delighted if he would join those of us who want Truss to succeed and publicly accept Johnson is toxic and has damaged the party considerably
I support her as leader but she is still 10% behind on the latest poll and this end bankers' bonuses cap now was her decision not Boris'. She and Kwarteng own it
You demonstrate my point perfectly and until you condemn Johnson then you are part of his toxic legacy
Does the same apply to Truss Big G? She only used the platforms at leadership conference and Downing Street last week to praise her predecessor, not bury him.
Because of first the partial surprise of the energy announcement, and then immediately after, the Queen's passing, there's been incredibly little coverage of just how much this month's change in the energy prices alone, from the current level to next month's, where they will be set, is going to affect thousands, possibly millions of people.
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
Hmm, I'd understood the energy price cap, on the "typical user" stat was going from £2000 to £2500. So, an 80% mooted rise had turned into a 25% rise.
Just looked at the unit prices compared with current, on a capped rate:
Electricity: 26.05p to 34p per kWh = 30% Gas: 6.93p to 10.3p = 48%
What gives? Is the 25% typical increase what the position will be AFTER the Rishi rebates are accounted for, or is my maths out??
The total bill will also include the daily standing charge, and I think, to their credit, that the government's reductions have been greater in the standing charge than on the unit rate. (I haven't checked the details, but I think this is what I saw, and it would explain the discrepancy).
Pics at the top of this never get old. Interesting thread.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1570169288849326082 Did a culture of institutionalised lying contribute to Russia's recent disaster east of Kharkiv, by giving its senior commanders a distorted and false picture of the true situation on the ground? A 🧵 reviewing the evidence... While reading Russian soldiers' personal accounts from published intercepted phone calls and personal accounts, I've seen one point mentioned repeatedly: Russian army officers frequently lie to their superiors about their unit's status...
That chimes very interestingly with the Royal carryings on this week. Just as it turns out there is a real and entirely contemporary point behind the "Q is dead long live the K" stuff, so this is why intelligent monarchs inspect their troops on parade. Sure it's ceremonial now but the point is: this is TOO IMPORTANT to take the word of the generals for, you get out there and see for yourself.
This was Saddam's downfall: if he hadheld WMD inspections regularly, there would actually have been WMDs.
Russia’s problem is that the only new weapons systems they have, are the barely-functional prototypes that turn up for the parades in Moscow, but never seem to make it to production.
That thread is typical of everything we’ve heard about the enemy in this war. They send untruths back up the line, because no-one wants to give bad news to the boss. The result is that their actual combat strength is a small fraction of what it’s supposed to be, with plenty of unserviceable equipment and poor situational awareness.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
It was an opinion based on information I have read from reliable sources, so no, I don't know "the fuck" know it for a fact.
It was presented as certainty not opinion. What are these reliable sources that are guaranteeing Russian forces will disobey orders to use nuclear weapons?
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
How the hell do you know? The bright light you see from most meteors you see crossing the sky at night are not much bigger than a grain of sand. I tend to go with the expert unless they say something obviously stupid.
Finland alone would crush Russian forces. Lithuania/Poland would smother Kaliningrad in a week. Russian Navy hiding behind Crimea even though Ukraine has no Navy.
Of course Ukraine has a f***ing navy.
The Ukrainian navy is tiny, the US Coastguard is bigger and more heavily armed.
Compared to the Russian Navy the Ukrainian had next to nothing. The Ukrainian military have comprehensively defeated the Russian Black Sea fleet, nonetheless.
Although I've argued in support of the tanks future on here, it's interesting that the three main "traditional" signifiers of military force - naval vessels, fixed-wing aircraft, main battle tanks - are all areas where you'd have thought that Russia has a large advantage over Ukraine, but somehow they've come to nothing.
Most people are explaining this by saying that it's the Russian ships that are crap, their pilots don't have sufficient training, and corruption has left tanks without functioning reactive armour - but it's possible that large surface ships, fast jets and tanks are all obsolete, due essentially to various types of missiles.
I hope the experts are having a good think, and trying to work out what the answer is. Damned if I know for sure.
Russia's military is perhaps a reflection of what the country has become under Putin. All the wealth has been sucked out by Vlad and his gang of oligarch cronies. The bullied and harried population is left to make do with the few crumbs that are left.
If you had systematically pillaged and terrified a population, why on earth would they fight to defend you?
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
Like HY and unlike Leon, I am a big traditionalist at heart - so instead of calling it a UFO I am calling it a dragon. They come from out the void and hide underneath the hill because before banks everyone used to bury their wealth and treasure and dragons love treasure.
The only other explanation is the importance of portents - if you are going to tell the bee’s the master is dead (just smacks of politeness to me but different if you truly superstitious) then what about signs in the sky, leaky pens - OMG 🫣
Personally, I am watching for news items about the sea boiling south of the Hebrides and communication slowly being lost with communities along the West Coast of Scotland....
Underrated IMHO. Johnson is an election winner and could easily come back if, as I predict, Truss becomes extremely unpopular. She is in the process of blowing up the electoral coalition Johnson assembled. Does Truss have the nous to make sure Johnson's political future is destroyed by the privileges investigation? I doubt it.
Johnson was an election winner. He is now toxic and the primary reason behind the Labour poll leads we see now. The Tories have done their leader change this Parliament, there is no road left for them to travel other than to roll the dice with Liz and hope.
So toxic that if he had been in the run off in this Tory leadership election he would have won it.
The Labour Party are loving the fact Boris is out of the way.
Yep. Starmer and labour spent the last year or so bluffing. They fear Boris way more than Truss. Or Sunak.
Kemi is an interesting one. Had the tories picked her, by the time of the election she could have neutralised her big negative (inexperience) and gone on to give labour a complete pounding, holding onto most of the red wall.
Or she might have been shit. We’ll never find out.
Badenoch’s other weakness, other than her inexperience, was her belief in hardline libertarianism, which holds zero attraction for the red wall, or the blue wall. Truss, it appears so far, is opting for similar policies.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
Serious question: would all out mobilisation help the Russian wear effort much? Is so, how?
And also, when?
A million more trained troops three years from now won't help much if the economy has collapsed, Ukraine has fully cleared them out by then and they can't equip them anyway.
If Putin tried to suggest to his high command that it was appropriate to use nuclear weapons (he cannot do it on his own) he knows he will be removed from power faster than a retreating "elite" Russian soldier on the Ukrainian front line.
How the fuck do you know this for a fact?
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
It was an opinion based on information I have read from reliable sources, so no, I don't know "the fuck" know it for a fact.
It was presented as certainty not opinion. What are these reliable sources that are guaranteeing Russian forces will disobey orders to use nuclear weapons?
Well actually I am Vladimir Putin's Friday afternoon bumfuck and while he is rogering me senseless he tells me that he would love to push the button the those irritating Generals are likely to assassinate him if he tries to suggest it.
There you are. Absolute fact. Now go and put those supply and reserve boxes in order or I will put you on a charge. And make it snappy.
Because of first the partial surprise of the energy announcement, and then immediately after, the Queen's passing, there's been incredibly little coverage of just how much this month's change in the energy prices alone, from the current level to next month's, where they will be set, is going to affect thousands, possibly millions of people.
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
Hmm, I'd understood the energy price cap, on the "typical user" stat was going from £2000 to £2500. So, an 80% mooted rise had turned into a 25% rise.
Just looked at the unit prices compared with current, on a capped rate:
Electricity: 26.05p to 34p per kWh = 30% Gas: 6.93p to 10.3p = 48%
What gives? Is the 25% typical increase what the position will be AFTER the Rishi rebates are accounted for, or is my maths out??
The total bill will also include the daily standing charge, and I think, to their credit, that the government's reductions have been greater in the standing charge than on the unit rate. (I haven't checked the details, but I think this is what I saw, and it would explain the discrepancy).
You need a lot of unincreased standing charge to turn around 40% to 25% (ok, looked up the current average, it is actually £1971 to £2500, so around 27%).
Combined standing charges around £250 per year. So for that 40% unit price is on £1700 ish, and standing charges would literally have to halve to bring the overall back down.
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
Like HY and unlike Leon, I am a big traditionalist at heart - so instead of calling it a UFO I am calling it a dragon. They come from out the void and hide underneath the hill because before banks everyone used to bury their wealth and treasure and dragons love treasure.
The only other explanation is the importance of portents - if you are going to tell the bee’s the master is dead (just smacks of politeness to me but different if you truly superstitious) then what about signs in the sky, leaky pens - OMG 🫣
Personally, I am watching for news items about the sea boiling south of the Hebrides and communication slowly being lost with communities along the West Coast of Scotland....
Having watched it cross the heavens, I am testing myself hourly for newly gained super powers… so far I have failed to ignite the cooker hob with a stern look of the eyes and have strained my back trying to lift the car whilst examining Mrs P”s undergarments…
Underrated IMHO. Johnson is an election winner and could easily come back if, as I predict, Truss becomes extremely unpopular. She is in the process of blowing up the electoral coalition Johnson assembled. Does Truss have the nous to make sure Johnson's political future is destroyed by the privileges investigation? I doubt it.
Johnson was an election winner. He is now toxic and the primary reason behind the Labour poll leads we see now. The Tories have done their leader change this Parliament, there is no road left for them to travel other than to roll the dice with Liz and hope.
So toxic that if he had been in the run off in this Tory leadership election he would have won it.
The Labour Party are loving the fact Boris is out of the way.
Toxic with the general population; not toxic with the rather unrepresentative Tory membership.
If you cannot see the difference there you might as well give up.
That’s rather combative post from you. you want some eh, come on 😆
But you are just plain wrong Ben.
Let’s take a look at the stats - party gate plunged Boris a lot, but they were swinging back in the right direction over time were they not? Are you saying for certain Boris would have lost the next election? I don’t think anyone can say that for certain can they - it’s for that reason I say you are plain wrong if you claim for certain he would have got a bad result against Starmer’s Labour.
Losing the argument, you change the parameters.
Of course I'm not saying for certain Johnson would have lost the next election; I'm saying that Johnson's undisputed popularity with Tory members does not mean he isn't toxic with the general population.
Well no. At height of party gate he was more unpopular with party members than when the parliamentary party ousted him. Swing back was going on in both Tory membership AND the country. He was coming back, the more partygate was history not in the news the more Boris was coming back. Just look at some government and PM ratings in the past mid terms and how they came back to win.
You are quite wrong, Labour did want him out the way and far more confident now because the way Boris comes alive in campaigns was an X factor in the calculation they could do without.
That is brilliant. Britain at its best. That is how we do communal experiences.
I can feel my next novel coming on: Queuing with Strangers. Endless possibilities for plot lines before, during and after the queue, as strangers intersect and new friends (or enemies) are made. Hope nobody beats me to it.
More interestingly you don’t get your wristband until the London Eye
Has the Queue grown… is it a preQueue? Or a queue to join the Queue?
My prediction is that Truss will turn out to be a lot better than many of us gave her credit for. Boris Johnson is a busted flush. He is yesterday's Clown; someone who achieved a great election victory against a ridiculously weedy opponent and managed very little else of note. His deranged supporters might want him back, but they will hopefully diminish in time, and before long it will be difficult to find anyone to admit they supported him.
I do wonder whether even he has fallen out of love with "Boris" as he always affectionately referred to him.
His posts do not indicate it so far, and I would be delighted if he would join those of us who want Truss to succeed and publicly accept Johnson is toxic and has damaged the party considerably
I support her as leader but she is still 10% behind on the latest poll and this end bankers' bonuses cap now was her decision not Boris'. She and Kwarteng own it
You demonstrate my point perfectly and until you condemn Johnson then you are part of his toxic legacy
Does the same apply to Truss Big G? She only used the platforms at leadership conference and Downing Street last week to praise her predecessor, not bury him.
Of course not - her comments were those of any successor to their predecessor
Analyst on R5L’s wake up to money - tracking a basket of essential goods says price difference between Morrissons and Aldi is now 40%. Explained by Morrisons having to service a gigantic debt.
Shop at Aldi, people.
Good morning
I heard that report as well and it is astonishing that Morrisons apparently have a 7 billion debt
Shop anywhere but Morrisons would be the message
5live also discussed Kwarteng's proposal to abolish city bonuses and it really does make you wonder if the conservative party have lost all it's instincts to govern
It may be the right thing from a business sense, but the optics are shocking and hands yet another gift to labour
It is the right thing from city workers sense. It is a bad thing for shareholders and really bad for government and taxpayers who will eventually have to fund another bailout with years of austerity.
I'm curious about this idea that bankers bonuses caused the subprime mortgage crisis.
I am even more curious about the idea that there will ever be another bank bailout.
Extreme bankers bonuses create incentives for bankers to gamble with the banks money. If they win, fantastic, if they lose its not their money and as long as you can talk the talk and know some of the right people, it is still easy to get another job.
That culture feeds through to the banks to gamble, notionally with their money, but knowing they have a government funded back stop as they are too big to fail.
Take away the controls and regulation and sooner or later we shall be back to bail outs.
Well, it's too bad the Labour government didn't do something about it then...
Of course. Not sure why you think that is relevant when they have not been in power for a long time and it is the current governments policies that will matter.
Well, the view of Labour supporters on the GFC is "it started in America".
That's not the view of Labour supporters, it is a statement of fact.
The global [key word, there] financial crisis started in America. Britain was very poorly placed to weather it because Gordon Brown had spent the previous 6 years [after an admirable initial period of restraint] pissing money up the wall, spending more than he raked in even during times of relative financial health. Personally I couldn't give a fig how big bankers' bonuses are. I don't care at all about the optics, I care about the gap between what we spend and what we earn. That should be the #1 issue for a chancellor of the exchequer to worry about. If this measure narrows that gap (and I am at best agnostic about whether it will) it should be welcomed.
Britain was hit badly because we have a large globally exposed financial sector and one of our biggest banks was in the midst of an ill-advised over-leveraged buying spree at the top of the market. Running a structural deficit of 4% of GDP in 2007 compared to a G7 average of 3% is unlikely to have been a significant factor in explaining why we were hit worse than others, no matter how much people want it to be Gordon Brown's fault.
Running a structural deficit of 4% during pre-crash times is utterly catastrophic as when the crash inevitably comes and you inevitably need countercyclical spending to go with it, then you have nowhere to go.
The fact that some other countries were nearly as bad as the UK doesn't justify or excuse what Brown did.
But it is hard to blame Brown's fiscal policy for us being hit *much worse than others* when Brown's fiscal policy was *pretty much the same as others'*. That was the point I was responding to. Also worth noting that our debt to GDP ratio in 2007 was 41% (down from 43% in 1997) compared to a G7 average of 81%. So we had plenty of space to run countercyclical fiscal policy, certainly compared to other countries, and indeed the increase in our debt to GDP ratio between 2007 and 2010 (33pp) was almost identical to the G7 average (32pp), suggesting that we were indeed able to run a countercyclical fiscal policy just like other economies.
Except it wasn't the same as others, it was via your own figures worse than others. And of course its worth noting that the G7 average includes the UK so the G7 average was itself getting dragged down by Brown's terrible performance.
Debt to GDP isn't the relevant figure, the deficit is, although its worth noting via your own figures again in the span of three years Brown nearly doubled our debt-to-GDP figure whereas G7 nations debt-to-GDP increased by much less than half.
Gordon Brown's peak debt to GDP being around 3% iirc which was on a par with preceding Conservative governments. It was not significant and did not cause or exacerbate the GFC.
Also, aiui Team Truss has determined, as Cheney said of Reagan, that deficits don't matter and that George Osborne's austerity was a mistake that hobbled Britain's economy.
Except....this was a time of unprecedented receipts. The housing market was going bananas, profits were high, and it was a time where debt to GDP didn't need to be as high given the circumstances in the economy. Simply, we were spending too much. I don't think anyone disputes that, no matter what they think the answer (austerity/non-austerity) should have been.
Yes, there is a good deal in that. But as it happened, the GFC came along and rendered it all moot. Then Osborne came along and flatlined the nascent recovery inherited from Labour, and here we are.
The GFC didn't just "come along and render it moot", the GFC was a crash that the Government should have been preparing for as it was overdue. Crashes happen, and the GFC was a classic crash, not some exogenous and unforeseeable shock.
And you repeat the myth that Osborne flatlined the recovery. Don't you realise the UK in the 2010s grew faster than the Eurozone did, both in nominal terms and in per capita terms. "Despite Brexit" supposedly harming the UK during that decade.
If Brexit and Osborne "flatlined" or harmed the UK, then how come the UK grew faster than the Eurozone or the rest of the EU? Just how much faster than them would we have grown in your eyes were it not for Osborne or Brexit, and why?
Osborne's austerity was a mistake as even the current vintage of Tories now acknowledge. The problem is that they have pivoted to pro-growth fiscal policies at precisely the wrong moment, with inflation out of control, and so they will only succeed in pushing up inflation and interest rates. Euro area growth was low because of their sovereign debt crisis and because they followed similar austerity policies to us, and because they had lower population growth.
It was not a mistake, because the deficit was out of control.
Pro-growth policies are good now because the deficit was brought under control prior to the crash, unlike in Brown's time, and so we're in a much better fiscal position than we were then.
The UK grew faster than Europe on a per capita basis too, again despite "austerity" and "Brexit" being both accused of "flatlining" growth. We had our own sovereign debt crisis caused by Brown's borrowing too, which is why Osborne needed to clean up Brown's mess.
The UK deficit is set to grow considerably under Truss, who appears to believe in trickle-down economics, something known not to work. So, deficit up, but no significant improvement in growth.
The question which needs to be answered is why hasn't Putin mobilised already? He definitely seems to be losing.
1. Will his population stand for it? Most of them, particularly those in Moscow, just want to carry on ignoring Ukraine. If they mobilise this will no longer be possible. Does it lead to serious unrest?
2. Does Putin think they are winning? Is it possible that no one is brave enough to tell him the truth? Or if as the early Twitter threads indicated is there lying from the bottom to the top so no one knows what is really going on?
For me this is the question that is the most puzzling. If he won't mobilise then how could he justify nukes as they would only be needed in a war and not a "special military operation".
"Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now?"
The monarch will always be divinely ordained, whatever liberal intellectuals may wish
Alternatively, you will always believe in fairies, and the Tory party.
There's also the slight problem that, *on the monarchy's own evidence*, it supports two different religions, or at least two very different varieties of non-RC Christianity, one north and the other south of the border. The English variety of Catholic episcopalianism, subordinating Church to State, is completely incompatible with Calvinist Presbyterianism. As indeed the history of the High Kirk of St Giles reminds us.
That seems to me to be a bit of a theological distinction, in both senses. There are far too many nuances and shades of grey.
There is no established church in Scotland, so I don't see how particular religious requirements can be placed on the monarch or the nation.
Secondly, it gets more interesting elsewhere' King Charles is also head of state of Papua New Guinea, for example. And that is a *very* interesting place for religion.
And the links between CofS and CofE pointed out above imo suggest that 'completely incompatible' is an overstatement.
Sorry I was out - so replying now. I had also thought that the Church of Scotland (strictly designated) was disestablished but it's not, in the sense that it remains the official church of Scotland [edit] as far as the state is concerned. Ydoethur pointed that out in a very interesting post a day or two back. And KCIII was swearing to protect the Protestant C of S at his proclamation-wotsit a few days ago. I don't *think* he did that for the Niugini religions, did he?
Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal is the Anglican church in Scotland even if the Queen is not its Supreme Governor unlike the C of E. However as you say the Church of Scotland is the official national church in Scotland and effectively the established church there.
To be even more specific, the SEC is not the Anglican Church = C of E in Scotland , but a member of the Anglican network. Not the same thing, not least because they are independently derived from different dioceses/groups of dioceses of the Roman Cahtolic Church (though in the case of the SEC via the Church of Scotland proper, most of which became and remained Presbyterian).
The SEC is the Anglican church and a member of the Anglican communion. Same as the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland, all who have the Archbishop of Canterbury as their ceremonial head even if they do not share the King as their Supreme Governor with the Church of England.
Pre Reformation both England and Scotland were majority Roman Catholic. The Scottish Episcopal Church actually started as early as 1582 just over 20 years after the Church of Scotland was founded to preserve bishops
"the Anglican church" - no, it isn't. That's the C of E if you are using those words. The SEC is quite different. It was never Anglican except in the sense that it joined the Anglican communion in recent years.
The two churches have different Reformations, different histories, different Williamite settlements.
Yes it is, every member of the Anglican communion including the SEC is an Anglican church.
Apart from not having the Kingas its SG there is little difference between the SEC and Church of England in service style or structure
The Anglican Communion is not the Anglican Church. Different levels, altogether. It's like confusing England and the United Kingdom.
And the SEC and C of E use different prayer books.
I'm afraid I have to agree with HYUFD here. You are the one who is confusing England and the United Kingdom. The Anglican Communion is the Anglican Church and members of any of the churches in the Anglican Communion, including the SEC, are Anglicans (although they are also referred to as Episcopalians in some countries). The Church of England is an Anglican church. It is not the Anglican church. The SEC is also an Anglican church, hence its website being scotland.anglican.org.
More film of the omen and portent last night ((C) MoonRabbit).
"Steve Owens, an astronomer and science communicator at the Glasgow Science Centre, said (...) 'The one last night might have been the size of a golf ball or maybe a cricket ball, maybe bigger than that'."
No way was that object as small as a cricket ball.
Like HY and unlike Leon, I am a big traditionalist at heart - so instead of calling it a UFO I am calling it a dragon. They come from out the void and hide underneath the hill because before banks everyone used to bury their wealth and treasure and dragons love treasure.
The only other explanation is the importance of portents - if you are going to tell the bee’s the master is dead (just smacks of politeness to me but different if you truly superstitious) then what about signs in the sky, leaky pens - OMG 🫣
Personally, I am watching for news items about the sea boiling south of the Hebrides and communication slowly being lost with communities along the West Coast of Scotland....
a week before Boris was ousted I cleaned behind the fridge, and all the grime looked just like a hand squeezing a dogs genitals.
Because of first the partial surprise of the energy announcement, and then immediately after, the Queen's passing, there's been incredibly little coverage of just how much this month's change in the energy prices alone, from the current level to next month's, where they will be set, is going to affect thousands, possibly millions of people.
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
Hmm, I'd understood the energy price cap, on the "typical user" stat was going from £2000 to £2500. So, an 80% mooted rise had turned into a 25% rise.
Just looked at the unit prices compared with current, on a capped rate:
Electricity: 26.05p to 34p per kWh = 30% Gas: 6.93p to 10.3p = 48%
What gives? Is the 25% typical increase what the position will be AFTER the Rishi rebates are accounted for, or is my maths out??
The total bill will also include the daily standing charge, and I think, to their credit, that the government's reductions have been greater in the standing charge than on the unit rate. (I haven't checked the details, but I think this is what I saw, and it would explain the discrepancy).
You need a lot of unincreased standing charge to turn around 40% to 25% (ok, looked up the current average, it is actually £1971 to £2500, so around 27%).
Combined standing charges around £250 per year. So for that 40% unit price is on £1700 ish, and standing charges would literally have to halve to bring the overall back down.
Is that what is happening?
OK, looks like my own unit charges are a smidge below the cap, MSE mentions slight regional variations:
Comments
I wouldn't call the Free Church of Scotland and the FCoS (Continuing) different denominations. Yet they diffe3r less than the two above.
The UK Meteor Network reckon last night's object was manmade, space debris.
Have the AA and RAC advised people not to drive? Or do their board members have brains in their heads?
Of course, if asked, RW voters are going to say they'd like to see their own taxes reduced. But I think all the polling evidence says that's not as important to them controlling energy prices and the CoL, improving health services, investing in their local economies, improving local services, improving schools.
https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/about/article/20220909-about-bc-news-Guidance-for-the-period-of-National-Mourning-0
It’s one of the few things on which Blair was correct. The government should be relaxed about people getting rich, so long as they pay their taxes.
If the UK attracts thousands more bankers (or footballers), and they all pay six or seven figures in tax every year, then there’s a discussion to be had about whether that money can be invested in public services or tax cuts for ordinary people. But we all need to agree that the more high-earners, the better for the country and the government’s books.
Compared to the Russian Navy the Ukrainian had next to nothing. The Ukrainian military have comprehensively defeated the Russian Black Sea fleet, nonetheless.
UK yields were considerably higher than German etc but remained lower than Greece in no small part because we weren't in the Euro (so could print Sterling) and because the markets priced in that the Tories would fix the mess. Had they not done so, the yields would have gone up further.
Saying we didn't need to fix the mess, because the markets were confident we would and we did, is not exactly reassuring.
(To be fair to our Epping Correspondent, he has a reasonable point. Even if you think Johnson was a bad Prime Minister who should never have been let near the job, it's foolish to deny his talents. Like with Mr Ripley.
There is a chunk of the electorate who voted for Boris. Not the Conservatives, Boris. A lot of them will be lost to the Conservatives now that Boris is gone. Ditching the old flubber was the right thing to do, but it's silly to pretend it's going to be cost-free.
Still, the free-market purists have got all the handles of the party and the government for the next couple of years. Let's see how they do, having hacked away the Cameroons, fiscally responsible Mayite traditionalists and Johnsonites. There's not much left, it has to be said.)
BBC reporting on DPRK (North Korea) overlaid on queen funeral procession
"For an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at the Methodist church, he has been analysing the financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics and other church-based projects.
Right now, he finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre, rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident, but with luck it can be done.
Scroll forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially. The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1 October, they will have no margin to cushion them."
20 years? 50?
The Tories pre-pandemic had 9 years of growth to reverse 13 years of damage, and were nearly done fixing his mess though now there's Covid/Russia etc to deal with too of course.
The new Commonwealth members aren't Commonwealth realms either
Thanks in no small part to what is now a much smaller Russian navy.
Box ticking "regulations" that Brown flooded people with achieve nothing apart from providing jobs to box tickers that then take the intelligence and foresight out of the discussion.
What was needed, was instead what we had pre-Brown which is smarter regulations, not more regulations. The Bank of England having oversight and responsibility for the sector, rather than tripartite division of regulations with nobody taking responsibility.
There are competing theories for why this is, but the Tories certainly never created a real “feel good factor” like the late 90s, early 2000s, or bits of the 80s.
Just looked at the unit prices compared with current, on a capped rate:
Electricity: 26.05p to 34p per kWh = 30%
Gas: 6.93p to 10.3p = 48%
What gives? Is the 25% typical increase what the position will be AFTER the Rishi rebates are accounted for, or is my maths out??
"It is [...] a common fault to refer to the Episcopal Church as the ‘English’ Church, whereas the Scottish Episcopal Church is entirely independent from the Church of England in its government, liturgies, and in the election of its bishops etc. it is, however, in full communion with the Church of England, as is the Church in Wales, the Church of Ireland and all the other members of the Anglican Communion (such as the Anglican Church in Japan or in Southern Africa)."
"From 1690, therefore, the Bishops and those who supported them, were forced out of the Church of Scotland: thus was the Scottish Episcopal Church born, and it has continued as a separate body ever since."
https://dcdchurches.org.uk/the-origins-of-the-scottish-episcopal-church/
But you are just plain wrong Ben.
Let’s take a look at the stats - party gate plunged Boris a lot, but they were swinging back in the right direction over time were they not? Are you saying for certain Boris would have lost the next election? I don’t think anyone can say that for certain can they - it’s for that reason I say you are plain wrong if you claim for certain he would have got a bad result against Starmer’s Labour.
Is this always true thought? Many people progress in careers, and since 2008 many will have changed jobs, or got promoted etc. Not everyone does the same job for their whole careers. Sure if you are in the same job as 2008, its likely you may not feel better off, but you could look for promotion, new job (great market right now) and you did at least survive a 1 in 100 year pandemic.
It hadn't occurred to me that there would be volunteers on the route, but it makes sense.
Johnson was responsible for one of the biggest fissures in the Tory Party since the Corn Laws. He became an international laughing stock. He thoroughly trashed the Conservative Party's reputation for sensible governance and found himself heaved out of No10 after only 3 years for dishonesty. Other than TMay you have to go back to 1827 to find a PM with a shorter tenure. He was hopeless. A bad joke. A man totally unfit for office. He was not successful, except in his ability to trounce the most ludicrous LoTO ever to have held that role, and to gull those foolish enough like @HYUFD into thinking he was appropriate to be Party leader and PM.
Losing Sevastopol completely so that a Ukraine in NATO could welcome in the US navy (and screw the Montreux convention) would mark a major change in the balance of power.
What's the scenario for Russia being forced to cede Sevastopol without reaching for the nukes and hello WW3? That's what I'd like to know.
This could be an interesting discussion. Sevastopol is a much bigger prize than the Donbas.
Stop scaremongering, you just make yourself look like a Putin paid troll.
Excessive regulation also gives investors a false sense of security ie the notion that investments are 'safe' when they may be nothing of the sort. The (sub)prime example being US mortgage bonds.
Plus: Big players use regulation as a barrier to prevent smarter, leaner new entrants into a market. The market in this case being banking.
Interesting thread.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1570169288849326082
Did a culture of institutionalised lying contribute to Russia's recent disaster east of Kharkiv, by giving its senior commanders a distorted and false picture of the true situation on the ground? A 🧵 reviewing the evidence...
While reading Russian soldiers' personal accounts from published intercepted phone calls and personal accounts, I've seen one point mentioned repeatedly: Russian army officers frequently lie to their superiors about their unit's status...
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1570170497232404480
32/ There likely isn't a single reason why this is happening. It's most likely a combination of institutional corruption (see threads below ⬇️), an emphasis on box-ticking rather than genuine achievement, and unwillingness to report bad news up the chain.
Honesty, integrity and oversight matter. Box ticking without them is just counterproductive and can even be abused to circumvent proper protections.
If Crimea comes into play then I think a full scale mobilisation and all out war is more likely than the nuclear options.
The only other explanation is the importance of portents - if you are going to tell the bee’s the master is dead (just smacks of politeness to me but different if you truly superstitious) then what about signs in the sky, leaky pens - OMG 🫣
But I don't think it's anywhere near the top of the list for Ukraine's current planning.
And the idea of discussing it now with Dynamo Moscow is just silly.
Most people are explaining this by saying that it's the Russian ships that are crap, their pilots don't have sufficient training, and corruption has left tanks without functioning reactive armour - but it's possible that large surface ships, fast jets and tanks are all obsolete, due essentially to various types of missiles.
I hope the experts are having a good think, and trying to work out what the answer is. Damned if I know for sure.
This was Saddam's downfall: if he hadheld WMD inspections regularly, there would actually have been WMDs.
Of course I'm not saying for certain Johnson would have lost the next election; I'm saying that Johnson's undisputed popularity with Tory members does not mean he isn't toxic with the general population.
Russia's so-called "elite" military units have been smashed and their equipment donated to Ukrainian forces.
How long is it going to take to mobilise untrained conscripts and send them into the theatre of war? And what are they going to be equipped with.
The age of simply throwing bodies into a conflict and winning via sheer weight of numbers is long since over. You need logistics to win wars nowadays, and Russia doesn't have it.
It would be good to get numbers on it though.
That thread is typical of everything we’ve heard about the enemy in this war. They send untruths back up the line, because no-one wants to give bad news to the boss. The result is that their actual combat strength is a small fraction of what it’s supposed to be, with plenty of unserviceable equipment and poor situational awareness.
If you had systematically pillaged and terrified a population, why on earth would they fight to defend you?
A million more trained troops three years from now won't help much if the economy has collapsed, Ukraine has fully cleared them out by then and they can't equip them anyway.
There you are. Absolute fact. Now go and put those supply and reserve boxes in order or I will put you on a charge. And make it snappy.
charge to turn around 40% to 25% (ok, looked up the current average, it is actually £1971 to £2500, so around 27%).
Combined standing charges around £250 per year. So for that 40% unit price is on £1700 ish, and standing charges would literally have to halve to bring the overall back down.
Is that what is happening?
You are quite wrong, Labour did want him out the way and far more confident now because the way Boris comes alive in campaigns was an X factor in the calculation they could do without.
Has the Queue grown… is it a preQueue? Or a queue to join the Queue?
We should be told!
1. Will his population stand for it? Most of them, particularly those in Moscow, just want to carry on ignoring Ukraine. If they mobilise this will no longer be possible. Does it lead to serious unrest?
2. Does Putin think they are winning? Is it possible that no one is brave enough to tell him the truth? Or if as the early Twitter threads indicated is there lying from the bottom to the top so no one knows what is really going on?
For me this is the question that is the most puzzling. If he won't mobilise then how could he justify nukes as they would only be needed in a war and not a "special military operation".
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/what-are-the-price-cap-unit-rates-/
Gas: 7.37 -> 10.3 = 40%
Electric: 28.34 -> 34 = 20%
Combined standing charges: 72.56 -> 74.85 = 3%
And 27% overall starts to make sense.