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Moving the Goalposts – politicalbetting.com
In these dark days we need all the shafts of light we can get in our politics. So it is with some gratitude that today we learn of two cases being brought before the European Court of Human Rights in the very same week that the tomato-throwing Lord Chancellor and Minister of Justice again brings forward his Bill of Rights and answers questions on it. What make these cases so delicious is that they are being brought by, first, Owen Paterson, erstwhile Tory MP and, second, Lord Ahmed, an ex-Labour Lord. Between them, these gentlemen’s activities have covered pretty much the entirety of what constitutes British politics these days: lobbying in breach of rules, favours for friends, anti-semitism, child abuse, sexual exploitation of women, contempt for the rules, a lack of any ethical standards, an arrogant refusal to abide by any judgment they don’t like and attempts to subvert Parliamentary processes for their own benefit. Only the wasting of untold billions on cockeyed schemes is missing, thank God. We’ve had quite enough of that to last several lifetimes.
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"Younger people are generally stupider. I think it's dietary."
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I had a drink with an academic friend yesterday. He was talking about the latest crop of students, 18 and 19, who are the first cohort really impacted by Covid and Lockdowns
He said it is horrifying. They are clueless and dim, AND their social skills are pitiful, they don't know how to interact, to flirt, charm, persuade. All they can do is scroll their phones, monotonously
He was already concerned by a decline in intelligence, but this has now - he told me - turned into a freefall
What have we done?
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
I must be slow. I didn't know these cases were going in front of the ECHR from these individuals and I'm astonished to hear that they are.
Embarrassing.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
Like cyclefree I'm rather baffled by the fundamental point that these public officials are, they believe, entitled to a level of privacy that extends to their conduct in office that would prevent any scrutiny of that conduct. I'm sure there is some really niche argument of law to be found here, even awful people have rights etc, but I'm really struggling to see it.
I think it is pretty obvious Raab, Sunak and the rest of the party would be inclined to take Paterson's side - that's why they stuck up for him in the first place after all, and backed down when it became clear the issue was not going away.
Have they no integrity? How do they live with themselves?
His wife of 40 years killed herself barely two years ago, and that would devastate anyone and make them angry at themselves, reckless and possibly destructive too.
But, I don't know why he's so poorly advised on this.
Even during peak Major-sleaze the Tories attracted a decent slug of working age people and even students.
Think on that.
And whilst politicians have always had to be shame-light, the current generation (patron saint: BoJo) tend towards shameless.
They'll soon be as unpopular with the over 60s.
Is this true, no idea it does sound plausible however
'Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank'
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28735-5
You don't want to know what chronic misuse does.
Instead, his supporters later claimed to have allowed their sympathy for him to go too far in trying to protect him from the consequences of his actions - Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed that as the reason he encouraged Boris to protect Paterson, that he had been punished enough because of that personal tragedy.
Which, unfortunately, was also a complete lie, since their action was a clear attempt to gut the standards regime, and a lot of nonsense about the process that had been taken, so had a clear political aim quite separate to sympathy with Paterson. At the most generous interpretation they used Paterson and he's a patsy.
But his pursuing the matter now suggests that is not the case.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence for it actually impacting intelligence.
(With the proviso that, if it is correct, then it will be France that powers past its continental neighbours, for that is the only country in the world where graduates are more likely to have babies than non-graduates.)
Though if that’s in real terms, perhaps nobody will notice.
The Tories seem to have boxed themselves into a corner with the over 60s, and doubled-down.
I can't think of any positive reason that's in my interests to vote for them.
That doesn't mean I'll vote Labour BTW (they'd put my taxes up even more, charge VAT on private school fees, increase immigration - despite Starmer’s smoke and mirrors, make moves toward Rejoin, get way more hectoring and dogmatic on climate change, micro regulate my daily life, fuck about with the constitution, and turbocharge the Wokery) but I still have no positive reason to vote Tory.
I may draw a phallus on my paper or chicken out and just write JOKE across it.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Seems to be a history of epic undershooting and delayed industrialisation, followed by it picking up the geopolitical scraps.
If they fall back on a core vote of those who already own a home and cut off aspiration then the Tories will lose massively, and deserve to lose massively.
Although I often don't agree with @Pagan2 he does come out with some left field ideas that are logically sound and very thought provoking.
Here you go:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-many-developed-countries-doesn-t-bode-ncna1008576
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/04/29/technology-is-on-the-rise-while-iq-is-on-the-decline/
"IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn't bode well for humanity
An intelligence crisis could undermine our problem-solving capacities and dim the prospects of the global economy."
The phenomenon has even got a name - the Reverse Flynn Effect. It is so-called for the New Zealand psychometrician who spotted that IQs have been rising for decades, until about 2000; then he noticed them going into decline, which might be accelerating
https://www.develop.bc.ca/news-and-publications/the-reverse-flynn-effect/#:~:text=Flynn attributed this increase to,the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'.
Allez la nouvelle alliance !
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Well maybe not the very last bit, there has to be a correction at some stage.
We do not have eugenic natal policies, nor does any western country. Quite the opposite
As schools have been more driven to get good grades in academic subjects for as many pupils as possible, life skills have fallen off the curriculum in many schools.
Linked to that, fewer kids do things like scouting and guiding, which was an excellent way of disseminating those sort of skills.
Finally, most of us are worse at home skills than our parents and grandparents. We don't need them in the same way.
It's probably better this way overall, but it's not cost-free.
A young software developer with high taxes, tuition fees, exorbitantly high rent and childcare costs might be quite worse off than a pensioner with a moderate pension income that isn't taxed significantly and has no housing or childcare costs.
Rent can cost many tens of thousands nowadays of pretax income. Living rent-free doesn't change tax rates, but does change living expenses more than anything else imagineable.
But to correlate it with the decline of copperplate script is defcon moonbat.
The one thing is their drinking habits......cocktails and shots...What happened to old school drinking?... two bottles of thunderbird with house mates getting ready listening to the Smiths, half price drinks at the Union and then off to a student club pilfering other peoples drinks....with luck and a fair wind you could get home on a fiver, a kebab and a shag to boot....
Having a paid-off mortgage is worth a lot of cashflow.
On housing and planning, it's not easy and we talk a lot on here about residential development and house building but there's also the commercial aspect to planning such as the re-classification of sites and property and change of use from one type of commercial activity to another.
That can also cause a lot of local concern especially if it is considered likely to "disturb" the local area.
I've long been of the view housing can't be seen in isolation - it's called planning for a reason and that means not just roads and transport but the whole web of infrastructure including schools, health services, shops and the like. The mood music in my part of London has been to throw up blocks of flats (mainly for rental) on brownfield sites (failed retail parks) without much consequential improvement to other local services.
I'm all for an active but properly regulated private rental sector as that is often what people require rather than moving straight into home ownership.
https://twitter.com/william_wragg/status/1595137668421410816?s=46&t=ViQb5-1MnxoAQ6vSdbOLnQ
Intderesting comments:
'Ill patients are refusing sicknotes from their GP because they cannot afford time off work, while physicians suffer “moral distress” at their powerlessness to do more to help the most vulnerable, the new leader of Britain’s family doctors has revealed.'
I have absolutely no truck with those who say critical thinking or fullsome debate is part of structural racism, or the hetronormative patriarchy or other such nonsense, and they are usually just cultural Marxists who are trying to escape scrutiny.
In somewhat related news, the USSC just ruled 9-0 that the House is entitled to see Trump's tax returns.
la Suède
Vive la France
£18000 in post-tax income is a hell of a lot more in pre-tax income. And with tuition fees too, childcare etc ...
Comparing an untaxed income with a mortgage-free home with a pre-tax income with rent is preposterously misleading.
The problem isn't the tax burden itself, which frankly we can't reduce to American levels without accepting American levels of poverty and inequality along with it, but with the unequal distribution of the tax burden. Property and inheritances should be taxed a lot more, to enable earned incomes to be taxed less; and the dreaded triple lock should be scrapped, in favour of targeted support for poorer pensioners - before we find ourselves in a situation where young people are handing over so much of what they earn to support luxury lifestyle spending by minted Home Counties' septuagenarians with hugely valuable houses that they can barely afford to feed themselves, let alone reproduce.
Who indeed is paying the legal fees?
The only pathetic thing these useless fuckwits can barely cling onto is their nonsense diatribe on woke....
There's no reason to vote for them and again, I've been going to member events recently, it's as bad as the stereotype. The members are largely old, out of touch and wildly selfish. For the party of low tax the members are absolutely in favour of higher taxes on working people if it ensures their pension benefits go up. I recently started a huge bust up by telling them that and telling them that the state pension is a benefit and the government should means test it so people with assets over £500k don't get it. I'm literally there to shit stir until we go back into opposition and they die so we can rebuild the party for working age people.
10 décembre
Angleterre 1 - 7 France
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RIP. A nice, clever, amiable geezer
How many people died in that awful blur of plague and lockdown, and we didn't notice?
On average 1 generous and 1 not-generous income with a mortgage-free home leaves more disposable income than 2 average worked for incomes subject to all taxes, plus tuition fees, plus rent, plus childcare etc
That's before we factor in the fact that the workers rent is on average going again to those who are living rent-free in their own home and that rent isn't taxed as heavily as going to work and paying National Insurance and Tuition Fees etc
And before we question how come 1 income was sufficient to buy a home in the past, but 2 incomes isn't today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lxD1cs8eYU
ETA launch just cancelled.