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The question that won’t go away for Sunak – politicalbetting.com
The question that won’t go away for Sunak – politicalbetting.com
Will you apologise for the £30 billion black hole created by your predecessor and Party? – @BethRigby Rishi Sunak refuses to apologise and refers back to the speech he made when he first became PM in which he said "mistakes were made".https://t.co/zn1yfsZxbw? Sky 501 pic.twitter.com/nYJHjj7EiF
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The real question(s) should be ok, you got the steering wheel now, what you going to do and why.
"Humans could face a reproductive crisis if action is not taken to tackle a drop in sperm count, researchers have warned after finding the rate of decline is accelerating.
"A study published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, based on 153 estimates from men who were probably unaware of their fertility, suggests that the average sperm concentration fell from an estimated 101.2m per ml to 49.0m per ml between 1973 and 2018 – a drop of 51.6%. Total sperm counts fell by 62.3% during the same period."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/15/humans-could-face-reproductive-crisis-as-sperm-count-declines-study-finds
It really does feel like a bizarre conflation of apocalyptic forces is determined to kick humans off the planet. I'm calling it The Omnigeddon: Revenge of Gaia
Epitomised by the screaming of stupid questions at politicians in Downing Street, then turning back to the camera and appearing to be serious. Pillocks.
*A proper generation, not a Scottish generation.
Just enough staff to keep going, but exactly that. If anyone else goes down we can't maintain mandated staff/pupil ratios (that is one teacher per scheduled class). No prep time whatsoever. We'll be reliant on the supply agencies tomorrow.
I'm fine. Negative.
“Mistakes were made” is way more pathetic.
Trying to get a top politician to apologise is unlikely to succeed, won't really ruffle them, and won't be appreciated even if they give it, which is another reason they rarely do, on top of not wanting to look weak.
It's a distraction to frame it that way, and probably makes it easier for him to avoid grapping with how bad things are and whether his plans will do any good, since while how bad things are is still part of the question, the framing gives him a hook to prevaricate if he wants to, since he can waffle on about the apology part.
I don't care if he apologises for it or not, I care whether he can do anything about it. That doesn't require a public mea culpa.
Apologies can look weak and certainly as he was not PM or Chancellor at the time no need for him to apologise. We will see in more detail in Hunt's mini budget how he and Sunak aim to resolve the problem
Most are being offered a choice of school. Do you want XY or Z?
School X (the nice, easy middle class one wins of course).
There was, and is, a sizeable minority of Conservative MPs who think the Kwarteng policy was the right policy and the mistakes were in presentation and going off too hastily. John Redwood has said as much today - he basically wants Hunt to implement a more measured version of Kwarteng.
This significant minority believe the only way to win re-election is to cut taxes and spending to boost growth - full stop. Now, I might argue that's a fundamental misreading of the public mood but that's not they see it - indeed, they see tax rises as another nail in the Party's coffin in terms of re-election.
Sunak has to consider that - there's no guarantee, having undermined two Prime Ministers, there isn't the capacity to knock over a third especially if the polls remain as disastrous as they are (24 points down with one I saw today).
The inflation figure tomorrow will be revealing - if, as in the US, there are signs the inflationary spiral is running out of steam, the possibility of interest rates not rising as much as feared heaves into view. If, however, inflation looks to be rising, the Government will need to convince the markets it can and is getting on top of the inflationary problem - I'm not quite sure how raising benefits in line with inflation achieves that but Sunak will argue (of course) he has to be seen to be helping the poorest.
The odd thing is the conflicting way they are dealing with it. Maybe @Foxy can comment if he is around? She has been moved to a separate bay in the ward, well away from others. Yet they did not bother to tell various visitors over last couple of days that she was positive.
Any 24 hour supermarkets open where you are?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-63624651
Liz Truss is a titan of our times. A visionary. A freedom fighter for liberty and all that is right. She will return: renewed, refreshed, reinvigorated. This is a mere interval in our audience to her greatness.
Beth Rigorous, that’s what they call her.
I heard a wispa that the new PM plans to fudge the books - maybe the City will be kinder but it’s not going to be a picnic. We just have to remember it’s a marathon not a sprint.
At first i thought Gibbon was going too far but after several minutes of Sunak's evasion I could understand why. He just wouldn't answer his questions. He was being slippery Just prepared answers to questions he wasn't asked.
The Boris Johnson technique in other words. He came across as slippery. Chris Mason asked the same questions and got the same treatment. Sunak has a lot to learn. Having a personal PR company will only take you so far
Iranian security forces shoot dead at least two demonstrators
Forces opened fire as protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death swelled on anniversary of bloody 2019 crackdown
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/15/iranian-security-forces-shoot-dead-at-least-two-demonstrators
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What a lady.
"If we focus exclusively on [House] districts where the margin of victory was less than 15 points, such that the seat was conceivably in the balance, the picture that emerges is quite different.
In these 114 districts, candidates bearing Trump endorsements underperformed their baseline by a whopping five points, while Republicans who were without Trump’s blessing overperformed their baseline by 2.2 points — a remarkable difference of more than seven points."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/15/data-trump-weighed-down-republican-candidates/
It is likely that, if Trump had just shut up after his loss in 2020, Republicans would have taken the Senate this year, and scored significantly larger gains in the House.
(More evidence for my -- mostly joking -- theory that Trump is a Democratic plant, installed to damage the Republican Party. And it does appear to be true that Bill Clinton encouraged Trump to run in 2016.)
*The “blackhole” phrase bothers me as, given the origin, surely it should mean that our finances are infinitely dense, not that there’s an absence.
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What a knight.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bqeGxMgVOHI
There's no way the marginal debt interest expense for Gilts issued during the brief Truss/Kwarteng spike comes to £30bn.
PSBR is about £20bn/month. If we also assume £10bn of gilts rolled over in the month (which I would doubt), then there is a maximum of £30bn of UK government debt issued at elevated rates.
If we assume an average maturity of ten years, and a 200 basis points increase in debt servicing costs, then we get 10 years * £30bn * 2%.
Which is £6bn,
Which is almost certainly too high.
Obviously, if the elevated rates were in place for six or 12 months, then you start to get to some serious numbers. But a couple of weeks after a bum budget will have resulted in a couple of billion of excess interest payments, no more.
One thing that may have dragged the Con rating so low this year is the amount of blue on blue. If this is the case, Sunak is wise to try and avoid more.
This is the first time the UK has changed Prime Ministers during a Parliament by having a full leadership contest, and going to membership - and look where it’s left the parties ratings in eyes of the voters. Just as you enter opposition by all means have debate for soul of your party, but after the blue on blue the losers have to show discipline and show support - this was blue on blue whilst governing, nor did Truss and Kwarteng have any discipline from losers afterwards.
Your header seems to be suggesting it’s wise for Sunak to break that discipline for party unity, stir party division again in his answers to Rigby?
Her questions above were plain stupid. They played into his hands. The more she was doing a job on Truss the more he was preening himself. He didn't want them to stop. All his Christmasses had come at once. As for the inane questions about apologising for Truss being useless....he could hardly suppress a giggle
It was Gibbon and Mason who gave him a hard time. They were canny enough to know that if you want to embarrass Sunak ask questions about his mistakes not hers!
https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2022/11/14/chestertons-fence/
“Lessons will be learnt”. How often do we hear this? If only. Lessons are not learnt: not by those who should learn them; not enough to prevent similar problems happening again.
Why?…..
It is unconscionable for the Scottish government to ignore evidence, to refuse to listen to women who have suffered abuse, to refuse to acknowledge the possibility of risks let alone assess them, to take no steps to mitigate them, not to do the necessary research, to assert what they would like to be true rather than engage and explain.
There is one comment which may not be quite accurate - that we don’t know much about trans prisoner offending rates - there is data:
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
Of the 125 transgender prisoners counted by the prison service in 2017, 60 had been convicted of sexual offenses, including 27 convicted of rape (BBC News 2018). In the overall prison population, by comparison, 19% of males had been convicted of sexual crimes and only 4% of females (Ministry of Justice 2018b)
I am not sure it did all of that on its own. This additional deficit could well be based on the forecasts & the difference between one OBR report back when and now. At one time the OBR didnt foresee inflation at the levels its at & and expected growth which isnt going to happen. The Truss budget didnt create either of those. Its damage on the public finances was borrowing costs which the budget was responsible for.
Ukraine & Poland
Whilst we wait for firm confirmation of what exactly landed on Polish soil what we can say is:
1. Yes it could have been a Ukrainian long range air defence missile
2. It could have been a Russian air to ground or surface to surface missile
3. It could have been a Russian air defence missile of the same type as the Ukrainians. The Russians have been using S300s in an improvised surface to surface role for many weeks.
4. There is a long range Polish radar station that has complete sight of anything in that region and the area is has enough ground & air sensors that it could microwave your brain. They will already have a high if not 100% confidence on its origin
One other thing, amid the idea of a winter pause in hostilities as if its some kind of football league, why should their be one? The Ukrainians are getting an awful lot of gear designed to operate in all but the harshest winter weather. Any pause is just as likely to be regroup, resupply and battlefield prep related as it is seasonal.
What's happened in the last few months has built for some time, and may have fundamentally shifted what people will accept in terms of political argument. So people will, in fact, give a toss about what happened, even if they don't think to specifically reflect on it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-announce-president-2024-rcna36987
Russian Telegram channels are now pushing the conspiracy that the missile strike in Poland was a British provocation
https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1592610774668939264
"If we look at all 401 contests in which a single Democrat faced a single Republican, there is not much difference. Relative to baseline expectations derived from their districts’ recent voting patterns (as calculated by the Cook Partisan Voting Index), 144 Trump-endorsed candidates exceeded their baselines by an average of 1.52 points. In 257 races where Trump did not endorse a general-election candidate, Republicans exceeded their baseline by 1.46 points."
Doesn't this imply that in the districts which were won by over 15 points Trump-endorsed candidates performed better than the ones he didn't endorse?
Not sure I really get why Trump endorsed candidates did better than the ones he didn't endorse in non competitive districts, but worse in competitive districts.
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1592603808634638336
Beth used 30 billion, many newspapers now say sixty billion.
There was a fantastic graph on PB last week, I think Ping, borrowing costs have gone up the same across Europe (except we seemed to start from a higher base) so that’s not fault of Truss and tge budget either. Nor the temporary run on the pound caused by US interest rates and strength of dollar against every currency. Nor were any of Truss tax cuts or policies actually implemented. Sunak’s policies have maxxed out the UK credit card with money pits like eat out to help out, Sunak is the one who presided over the mess pension schemes have got into. Sunak was the chancellor who carried on printing money long after it wise to do so.
So my theory is Sunak and Hunt are bullshitters - they need money for services like NHS, need money to bail out councils, need money to buck the energy market till April - they need money to pay for THEIR policies and invent rubbish about black holes to justify their “mug everyone” budget.
If it’s a painful budget, it’s to pay for Sunak’s years at treadury, not Kwartengs hours there.
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/blind-woman-branded-transphobic-raising-28498750
BREAKING:
The Polish government confirms that the missile that struck Poland and killed 2 Poles today “is a Russian-produced missile”.
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1592660147473895424
https://twitter.com/MPSIslington/status/1592486438951849984
Not sure they understand the word.
We incited them to do it with Liz Truss's anti-russian rants?