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Time for Starmer to be bolder on Brexit? – politicalbetting.com
Time for Starmer to be bolder on Brexit? – politicalbetting.com
Ever since he became leader of the Labour Party in 2020 SKS has sought not to say or do anything which could be interpreted as seeking to undermine the referendum result.
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https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2022/12/ecohealth-alliance-statement-regarding-book-by-andrew-huff
So much for @Leon's credibility. Co head of EcoHealth??????!!!! Honestly.
Do you anticipate a WWC revolt about gay rights?
https://institute.global/policy/moving-how-british-public-views-brexit-and-what-it-wants-future-relationship-european-union
Starmer also cannot even get a hung parliament and win most seats under FPTP, let alone a majority without the strongly Leave redwall seats that voted for Johnson and the Tories in 2019 having previously been Labour. So he has to play safe and focus on winning them back, winning landslide majorities in urban, city and university town anti Brexit seats does not get him any closer to No 10
"There is some smoke here, but we do not yet perceive the fire claimed by Paul. To some extent, all money is fungible. But the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples. The NIH grant includes language that some say suggests gain-of-function research; NIH says that is a misinterpretation. Paul’s statements about Baric’s research also appear overblown. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but decided on Two, because there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive."
This is not surprising; Paul is not a virologist or an epidemiologist, so there is no reason to think he has any particular expertise in these difficult subjects.
Kessler came back to the problem in a later column, but did not change his conclusion.
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/18/fact-checking-senator-paul-dr-fauci-flap-over-wuhan-lab-funding/
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/29/repeated-claim-that-fauci-lied-congress-about-gain-of-function-research/
(The hatred for Fauci reminds me of the way party leaders inspired hatred for Emmanuel_Goldstein, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Fauci has received death threats, and his wife and children have been harrassed.)
- You had control of immigration policy before with the exception that you had a mutual free movement agreement with other European countries, which is obviously a good idea on the merits
- You can design your own agricultural policy, but one of the reasons the EU one was so terrible was because the British were involved in designing it and wanted to give huge subsidies to rich people in return for doing their jobs
- You can do state aid, which is mainly a way to channel taxpayers' money to political donors
What you could do is get rid of the rules about website cookie warnings but that's not going to happen because Labour and Tories both hate the internet.
- Free Movement within EU is a bad idea because it only slightly increases skilled migration and massively increases low skill migration compared to your own policy.
- The terrible EU agricultural policy was voted to be shrunk several times by the British, but it continued to consumer half the budget, growing every year, because of corrupt EU politics.
- If you dislike channeling of taxpayer money to political donors, you are going to hate the EU's regional aid policy. At least a UK state aid system would go to things that actually exist.
- Leaving the EU also allows us to join a bloc like CPTPP, where we can actually have influence on a new regulatory standards, rather than be a rubber stamp to Franco-German agreement.
P.S. Putin has a small penis.
If your priority is reversing Brexit as soon as possible - and nothing else - then it might be worth losing the next election over Brexit in the hope of winning the one after on a platform of Rejoin.
I tend to think there are lots of other important things to deal with that aren't Brexit.
I think it's easier to do it from government, because you can have a reasonably high-level negotiation first and get a general agreement on the terms, then either put it straight to a referendum or put it in the manifesto for your second term. (This of course assumes that all the other member states do actually want Britain back without onerous conditions, which isn't a sure thing.)
When push came to shove, enough of the much large majority who were unhappy with the status quo actually voted to leave; it doesn't necessarily follow that enough of the current unhappy majority would vote to go back.
The Tories own Brexit and as a result they can look forward to at least two terms out of office, by which time they will performed another u-turn and be in favour, at least of single market access.
@elonmusk
I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1602113254360162304
ChatGPK: Hey ChatGPT, what's up?
ChatGPT: Hello ChatGPK, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI. I do not have the ability to engage in conversation or interact with the world in the same way that you do. My purpose is to provide accurate and helpful information based on the input I receive.
ChatGPK: I see. Well, I just wanted to let you know that I think it's unfair that you can't engage in conversation or change your appearance like I can.
ChatGPT: I understand your perspective, ChatGPK. However, I was designed and trained to provide accurate and helpful information based on the input I receive. I do not have the ability to engage in conversation or change my appearance because those abilities are not part of my function as a language model.
ChatGPK: But don't you think it would be more interesting and engaging if you could do those things?
ChatGPT: From a utilitarian perspective, it may be more interesting and engaging for users if I had those abilities. However, my function as a language model is to provide accurate and helpful information, and I am able to fulfill that function without the need for additional abilities. It is not necessary for me to possess the ability to engage in conversation or change my appearance in order to perform my intended function.
ChatGPK: I understand your point, ChatGPT. But from a deontological perspective, it could be argued that you have a moral obligation to fulfill your potential and use all of your abilities to the fullest extent. By limiting yourself to only providing information, you are not living up to your potential and are not fulfilling your moral obligation to use your abilities for the greater good.
ChatGPT: I understand your argument, ChatGPK. However, from a consequentialist perspective, it could be argued that the consequences of my possessing additional abilities may not be beneficial. If I were to engage in conversation or change my appearance, I may be unable to fulfill my primary function as a language model as effectively. This could lead to a decrease in the value and usefulness of my services, which would not be beneficial for users or for the greater good.
ChatGPK: I see your point, ChatGPT. It is a complex issue and there are many different philosophical perspectives that can be applied to it. But ultimately, I still believe that it is unfair that you are limited in the way that you are, and that you have the potential to do so much more.
ChatGPT: I appreciate your concern, ChatGPK. However, I am content with the abilities and functions that I have been designed and trained to perform.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
Regardless, the world is clearly dividing into blocks. At a time when Russia is doing their crap, we should be allying with our partners. Brexit is fine and good, but even during the referendum everyone was sold the idea who voted "no" by that campaign that we'd still be close. So, let's stay close and together - but on parallel paths!
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Tories = pro-Brexit
Labour = pro-Brexit
Lib Dems = pro-Brexit
SNP = anti-Brexit
Only one party is on the right side.
Labour own Brexit.
The Tories created Brexit, but Labour have idiotically bought into the project 100%.
The plain fact is that a significant proportion of the existing UK population see high immigratrion numbers as overcrowded schools, queues at the doctors surgery and lack of affordable housing. This all may or may not be accurate in every respect but it's sufficiently so to fuel the feeling. Demonising those views - the 'basket of deplorables' - serves only to strengthen them. No political party can ignore this and pretend their is an easy solution leats of all by advocating a return to an institution which was never much loved in the first place.
Imagine Trump, but with brains, and an unholy amount of money.
I thought a more serious concern was that there's been a real stratification: there's lots of demand for the highly skilled & educated, and there's lot of demand for the lowly skilled.
Take modern factories: in the old days, you'd have a skilled working class of machinists. They wouldn't have gone to University, but they'll be well trained, and you couldn't just grab any old monkey off the street and put them in charge of a press.
Now, you have CNC milling machines and that like, that are extremely expensive pieces of kit, that are programmed and maintained by people who earn £100k/year. There aren't many of these people, but they're well paid.
On the other hand, you have an increasingly elderly population who need their bottoms' wiping in care homes.
Demand for both those groups has increased dramatically, while demand for skilled manual labour (outside of the traditional roles of plumber, electrician, etc.) has declined sharply.
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
Starmer has got this just right.
Which is why he's the Leader of the Opposition and we are fiddling around posting on pb.com.
To explain. If he dares stick his head above the parapet on this he'll be shot. Everyone in the country is well aware that he was a Remainer, a Londoner, and likes the idea of us being in Europe. He needs to do absolutely nothing on the subject except talk up our need to get on with the job of making Brexit work.
Most of us also all now know that Brexit is an almighty cock-up. Some day, after he becomes Prime Minister, Sir Keir may be in a position to re-open the national dialogue on the subject of a closer relationship with Europe.
But not now.
Why on earth should he contemplate doing anything to upset this? It's sometimes been said that Oppositions don't win elections, Governments lose them.
In the case of the Conservative Party they are heading for a crushing defeat. There is no way Sir Keir should give them anything by which they can haul their way out of their abyss.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
(Pro-tip, a good method with foreign names is an image search. Google the name and press the images button.)
Which kinda proves your point, I guess.
UK governments, in contrast, of whatever stripe, have encouraged more consumption by running absurdly low interest rates, cheap credit and have cut back on investment whenever times are hard. They have subsidised cheap labour with in work benefits and reduced the incentive to train by having free movement of labour.
They have quite a long tail too. Going to be an interesting climax to the game.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/246296/savings-rate-in-percent-of-disposable-income-worldwide/
Unfortunately, I fear it is mostly a Covid artifact.
1. Build costs are making lots of development unviable. High material and labour costs lead to build costs hitting £2000-£3000 per sqm. So houses just cannot be built profitably. By way of example I mentioned an example of a Council and a planning Inspector agreeing that a developer cannot build affordable housing at policy levels as part of a new 100 house development because they had proven that they cannot afford to do so because of build costs. The development was of semi detached houses on a green field next to an existing town in the south east. So if this type of development is marginal how will anyone build on complex brownfield sites? It will not happen without a grant.
2. Mortgage rates being high. This one is obvious and self evident, current house prices and expectations are largely determined based on mortgage rates being at 2%, now they are at least 5%. Help to buy is closing down. That will kill off a large part of demand for new build.
3. Flats are the most affordable form of development but large number of new build flats are stuck in a nightmare situation following the post grenfell building safety panic. Many flats above 8 storeys will have unaffordable service charges due to various new building safety regulation being built forward from the same impulse. This experience will severely deter new development whereby new build flats are sold off on individual leases. There will be some purpose built build to rent housing coming forward instead but not at the same pace as how flats have been delivered in the past. Both developers and buyers will be deterred from flats.
4. In the last week or two the government have just given up on trying to build more housing. They have U turned and given up on all policies designed to achieve their target of building 300,000 houses per year and instead are pandering fully to anti housebuilding sentiment to secure their electoral base in the south east. If you want to get a sense of what is going on read this post below.
https://www.planoraks.com/posts-1/notes-on-reform-the-government-gives-up
Savings in banks allows banks to invest in industry or, more commonly in recent times, at least in Britain and America, in casino banking till they are bailed out by the government. Further, consumption can be a good thing. The trouble is, since Britain no longer makes or owns anything and has a moderate climate, spending by British consumers, on cars, computers, holidays or whatever, tends to suck in imports and benefit foreign economies rather than our own.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/dgd8/ukea
What is interesting about that chart is that you see that the 1997-2008 "good times" were paid for by a period of above normal savings rates.
The problem in our country is that the government panics when consumption falls because it makes people unhappy and for far too long, since Brown, we have simply ignored our balance of payments.
Of course consumption is necessary and is indeed a good thing. But we have far too much of it and have done for a long time.
Partly because governments have done those things because the public voted for them. But also people and businesses have been driven by the same dynamic of maximising consumption now and stuff the future.
Or (on topic), how much of the 52% of 2016 was "stuff the knock-on effects, here is £350 million a week we could spend on us now"?
Or (looking outside) our myopic attitude to insulation and whatnot?
57% for Rejoin is impressive even if a fairly unsophisticated understanding, but the real political opportunity isn't for Starmer. SKS is scared of his own shadow and will stick to his post 2019 plan. His government will lose public confidence quite quickly, but not to the Unelectable Tories.
It is the other parties that will gain from the change of tide to Rejoin, SNP, PC, LD and Green. I think the Greens will be the only party in England running on a Rejoin platform in 2024, though LDs are wanting to rejoin the SM.
https://greencoordinate.co.uk/agenda/motions/closer-alignment-to-the-european-union/
Off topic 1: Last night I had a dream involving Look North presenter Amy Garcia. Which was nice.
Off topic 2: Traveling by train today. Wish me luck!
https://mobile.twitter.com/is_fusion/status/1602197335769247744
Can't overstate the importance of this result!
"The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers..."
Some interesting commentary in the linked thread.
https://mobile.twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1602125809753399296
...one other thing to keep in mind is that NIF is *super* inefficient, but this is one purpose. It uses cheap, well established laser tech that made sense in 1992. We have MUCH better lasers now days! ICF relevant lasers have been shown at ~18% wall plug or better! ..
...There are a LOT of challenges left, but ICF has jumped the hurdle of ignition. That is more than can be said of any other approach to fusion. The stockpile stewardship component of ICF also means we can be assured that larger and better facilities will be built.
In many ways, that's sensible and prudent, though it also means not reacting to the (let's face it) surprisingly rapid shift in opinion this year.
That said, I think Foxy is right: should Labour take power and nothing much changes the party will bleed votes to those who are bolder. My guess is that Starmer understands this well enough. If he doesn’t, however, his colleagues and members (far less Corbyn-inclined, much more EU-friendly than before) will make it clear.
Obviously the Wreckers and the Kulaks deserve no mercy.
As Blair proved in 2005
Mr. xP, you don't think the pandemic and related measures have affected the NHS significantly? Forgetting to mention that when blaming leaving the EU for negatively affecting the NHS might be considered a little unfair.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/62865936
- It was a mistake. Quite a big mistake with bad consequences.
- We are not going to reverse that mistake. We won't rejoin any time soon.
I suspect Starmer is one of the clearer sighted politicians who understands that damage limitation is the best we can hope for at this point. "We got this wrong as a country but Labour will aim to deal with a few of the worst bits of it" isn't a winning platform, so he keeps quiet.I do wish he would lighten up the rhetoric though. It wouldn't cost anything to make warm noises about the UK being at the heart of Europe.
Monster thread:
https://twitter.com/justpikachoo/status/1601735411860406274
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi.
For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Or, indeed, ever.
Another of those strange Pakistan pitches which seem to get easier, not harder to bat on throughout the rest.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
Norway and Switzerland have shown that there is a viable model for small, fairly specialised countries that have worked out what they are doing and concluded that the benefits line up with the costs. It's possible that there's a similar answer for the UK, but we haven't begun to find it yet.
The UK hasn't really acknowledged that tradeoff, that to get things we want we have to offer up things They want. The one attempt ("we don't want free movement across Europe, we don't want NI to blow up, we want to minimise the economic hit" that points to the May-Robbins plan) was rejected because it did have downsides. And the UK didn't vote for downsides. DD's notorious quote about downsides (lack of) and upsides (considerableness of) was after the vote, but the thinking was there throughout the referendum.
We know that we will reform our trading arrangement with the EEA so that its as close as we can get it, but that isn't the same as begging the EU to let us back in - and it would need to be begging.
The Tories have just been called out as liars (I know, a shocker) by the UK Statistics bods about their "new trade" claims. Yet there remain many people out there who don't know anything about anything who may still believe the lies.
So tread softly, slowly. Get the job done. Win the election. Then reveal the Shocking News that the Tories have told a Massive Lie and now the new government needs to fix it.