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A Brexit bonus from Chancellor Kwasi? – politicalbetting.com
A Brexit bonus from Chancellor Kwasi? – politicalbetting.com
We have one at last! According to press reports, Kwasi Kwarteng is thinking of lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses and presenting it as a Brexit win. To echo the eminent lawyer, Marshall Hall (asked by a judge if his clients were familiar with the phrase res ipsa loquitur) – Chancellor, in the Red Wall, they talk of little else.
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I can only assume that the strategy is to dash for this 2.5% growth target and hope to get there in time for election and then run a campaign saying 'don't let Starmer ruin it'.
I doubt, though, even if they hit the target (and there is no real sign they have a clue how to) that most ordinary voters will notice.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/15/23354619/ethereum-cryptocurrency-merge-energy-electricity-greenhouse-gas-emissions-reduction
All Britons
Should scrap: 15%
Should not scrap: 67%
Con voters
Should scrap: 20%
Should not scrap: 65%.
The North of England most anti scrapping the bankers' bonus cap, 71% against, 15% in favour. The South most supportive but even there 65% opposed, just 16% in favour
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1570430058292211718?s=20&t=ORZ2SzNedSUAstdxVD_xXw
Tories will I assume try the 1992 tax bombshell tactic. They are creating facts on the ground. The question is whether they are doing so masterfully like Russia in 2014, or so cack-handedly that it leads ultimately to their destruction like Russia in 2022.
Of all the changes Kwarteng and Truss are proposing I think Labour should focus on the regulatory ones. Nobody (apart from a few bank employees) will vote Tory because they are protecting banking bonuses. Many will vote Labour or Lib Dem to protect food standards, stop sewage releases on beaches and ensure net-zero.
What I would legislate is that, for a company employing in the UK, the CEO's or any top earners bonus, can only be a certain.multiple of the lowliest employees bonus (say 40% average vs 20% average). The pension in multiplier terms is on a par with the lowliest employees terms. Etc.
Pay your top staff an uncapped bonus, expect to pay much more to the lowliest too.
Oh, and note that your cleaning contractor has a CEO as well.
It's not really about age - more imo about worldview. It was a practice I adopted in my early 20s after reading a book by an interesting sociologist called Dr Andrew Walker, arguing that modernity had removed richness from life. An interesting man - he was a convert from rationalised Protestantism to more numinous Russian Orthodoxy, which has a far deeper ritual practice.
Around death the case was that people who have died are still part of our lives through being in our memories and in our lives through things we have shared with them, and that modern culture seeks to hide death (and illness) away in hospitals, which are almost a factory setting, to hand it over to professionals, and not to acknowledge the full breadth of the relationship. He viewed the over---transactional nature of modernist culture as dehumanising.
And that it is far healthier to acknowledge that continuing relationship with someone who has died, and deliberately allow it time to steep and turn into a memory, than to package it up and try and bury or burn it with the body at a single stroke. I treat viewing the body as part of the process of allowing my relationship with the deceased to develop from a living relationship into an acknowledged memory over time.
There are parallel things - hospices focused on a 'good death' are part of it, as is a swing towards deliberate acknowledgment of dying / death over the last several decades, as are homespun rituals that many adopt.
To return to @ping 's point, I think that one important function of the current process is to remind ourselves of our largely unwritten constitutional settlement - just as the various parades around Parliament, Black Rod having the doors slammed etc. Naturally some people who would prefer a written constitution etc are protesting.
I note there is no answer to this question.
If Starmer could design his ideal Tory opponent, at the moment Liz would be it unfortunately!
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-102004/
It is an extremely well researched piece that is also extremely funny, if you like your humour pitch dark.
But of course everything will be completely different now 😉
It's moving inexorably closer to my patch of SE London.
The only other time we get mass gatherings of the general public down here is on London Marathon day.
It would be a courageous decision.
That's 100,000 looking at OTHER people looking a box with a crown on it
Given that this is on 24/7 the overall viewing stats will be phenom
If people in the private sector get paid more, then HMRC takes more in taxes, and then they can spend more on your pet projects, whether it be Care or the NHS or Education. The public sector wages can't go up without a healthy private sector paying for it.
If people are evading their fair share of taxes, then that is a problem, which needs to be tackled. But if people are getting paid more, which is getting taxed honestly, then that should not be considered problematic.
However, a sensible government doesn't look at policy in isolation. There are two ginormous downsides to the announcement. The first is the obvious one that the politics is dire: this is a massive free gift to Labour, especially now when many ordinary people are facing financial difficulties or outright disaster. The second is that it will encourage the EU to make life harder for the City. It's a double own-goal, a blunder which only an extremely inexperienced and over-confident new Chancellor and PM could make. It doesn't bode well for the government's prospects in the months ahead.
There were confident reports that nothing would be done about energy bills this winter
How confident is this report on the @Leon rumour scale?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzaWpkHQ5JQ
ETA it's a bit dull tbh
As the world's foremost connoisseur of Royal Lying-in-State Livestreams I have to say the one in St Giles Scotland was marginally better, as the mourners got more time with the coffin - ten or fifteen seconds rather than 3 or 5 - allowing more intense emotions to emerge: proper tears, deeper bows, murmured prayers
The sheer weight of numbers invLondon is limiting the emoting
However, it is still compelling to watch. All those people, all those stories. Just now some rich, well dressed woman - completely composed - did an urgent almost gasping prayer. WTF
If it is a good policy then argue for it on its own merits.
If its a bad policy, then diverging from that will make us more competitive than the EU, if they end up sticking to a bad policy.
Diverging from bad ideas is not problematic. That is precisely the benefit of Brexit.
A. Yes, in which case can the limit
B. No, in which case don't can the limit.
There's no stability issue here really. If banks start making big losses, the post 2008 system means that these losses can be borne by investors, not taxpayers.
Last time it was an archer collapsing. Maybe this time it will be an arquebuser vomiting
She was also lucky enough to be facing a failing Labour government, not be PM 12 years into a Tory government
This is multiplied by the press often not having a clue and inventing stories.
If there's no regulation, you won't need regulators.
WTAF is autocorrect playing at? Even when I'm typing words correctly it randomly changes them.
Honestly, more useless than Amanda Spielman.
"Because it's an historic moment. How often do you get to see a long queue of people simply waiting in line to see the huge queue of people that are patiently waiting to see that totally massive queue of people who are slowly queuing to see the queen? We had to join the queue. It's what she would have wanted"
As they enter the great medieval hall, and walk in their little shoes down the steps to confront the coffin, you can see, on their tiny angelic faces, they are also thinking: What the c*nting hell is all this shit about?
(As for dentists, are you right about the ILFSP? Lots of them have gone private for much or all of their work. And the impression I get is that even when they are doing NHS work some are employees of private firms which get the dosh from the NHS.)
Keep an eye out for how people should be 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'.
Whatever it is they were all brainwashed together with, it’s not Conservatism - it’s extremely dry 21st century neo liberal economics or something, because as HY points out in recent post, everything Truss government announces instantly fails the Mrs T 1980s conservatism test, let alone the “Cameroon” view.
A: Because its a good idea, but Labour voters may not like it.
B: Because its a good idea, but the EU are cutting off their nose to spite their face, so we should too.
That plus it nicely neutralises any future attempts at finger pointing at Brown for single-handedly causing the financial crisis by deregulating banks. An attack line that served successive Tory leaders well despite their own track record on the subject, but will be unusable henceforth.
This policy change is going to lead to whoopsies.
There, done. And move on. It won't stay in the news for long, once its done, its done.
https://bda.org/careers/becomingadentist
Of course, it's insignificant compared with the damage already done to the economy by government policy since 2019.
He caused the issues by overspending and by screwing up the regulations by removing Bank of England oversight from the Banks.
More regulations don't make the financial sector more secure if they're bad regulations, you need deregulation but smart regulations, rather than box ticking for the sake of politics.
Government's also promise endless amounts of efficiency savings without affecting performance or outcomes, and is that always achieved? Do you really think it will go down well with voters or that they won't care, when it is so easy to portray as Tories revealing their priorities?
A woman who can barely walk, determined to curtsey
An affluent seeming middle aged man trying not to cry: and failing
Lots of masked East Asian people who are super respectful and do enormous bows: Hong Kongers?
And teens. Really quite a few teens. Girls with blue hair, boys who look like skateboarders. That is unexpected
And on and on it goes
You seem to still believe in this myth of an "EU response" that will bully the UK, which is as mythical as the notion Russia can just steamroll their tanks into Kyiv.
If this is the right thing to do, the time to do it is in the sweet afterglow of a new electoral mandate.
Even if this works*, it's not going to work by autumn 2024. So proposing it now gets the political pain without the tax receipts. Nuts, and the sort of thing that you do if you read about Maggie without direct experience or understanding.
* By works, I'd go a bit wider than annual tax take. Does a bonus obsession encourage too much risk to be taken by bankers? I don't know, but it needs consideration.
He must think its a lot, to risk the political capital.
Eight hours of queuing to note that yes, at the end of the queue, there is the box in which the body of the Queen lies. Stiff upper lip and all that. A bried nod, and move on, and reflect. But reflect internally!
Look upon this world: this is how the British mourn.
Any major changes she wants to get done, that might not be politically appealing, now is the time. The politically appealing ones, those you can save up for the General Election year.
Labour now have banking bonuses, CT cuts, no windfall tax and fracking in Northern constituencies to go after in poorer marginals.
Lib Dems already have raw sewage releases (which focus groups suggest has real salience) and may shortly have food standards, net zero and (probably) another spat with the EU to weaponise.
The Spectator nailed it earlier, with lines that could have been literally stolen from our debate
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-the-live-streamed-lying-in-state-says-to-us
'This package is to provide support and boost growth'
'Well lets see how that goes'
"Heathrow to stop all flights for national silence on Monday
Heathrow airport has announced that it will stop all flights for 15 minutes before the two-minute national silence on Monday and 15 minutes afterwards as a “mark of respect” to the royal family.
Flights will also be grounded during the arrival of the funeral cortege and procession at Windsor Castle, and diverted around the castle to minimise noise during the private family service on Monday night.
[...] Passengers affected by these changes will be contacted directly by their airlines about the options available to them, a spokesperson for the airport said.
They added that passengers who have been notified that their flight has been cancelled, or do not have a confirmed seat on a flight, should not go to the airport."
😆
This hasn’t been one of your better days Barty.
Less than 50% of the members of her own party voted for her. She just about pipped second in vote of her parties MPs.
Britain must not let petty officialdom stop millions from paying their respects to the late Queen
ALLISTER HEATH" (£)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/14/dont-let-petty-officialdom-stop-millions-paying-respects-late/
After two days, the Bishop sat bolt upright, glared at the mourners and shouted 'what the f*** are you all staring at?'
But then, I already had a very low opinion of the Chancellor.
Mrs Stodge's colleague got home at 4.30am having joined the queue at Southwark Bridge at 5.30pm.
According to Mrs Stodge, it's a long story.
Details to follow.
If you're not going to implement your agenda when you win and become Prime Minister, when will you?