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Ex-pm Johnson makes most of this morning’s front pages – politicalbetting.com
Ex-pm Johnson makes most of this morning’s front pages – politicalbetting.com
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Ex-pm Johnson makes most of this morning’s front pages – politicalbetting.com
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This is up from 24 million, or two-fifths of households, when Tony Blair was in power at the turn of the millennium.
The top 10 per cent of earners pay 53 per cent of all income tax, turning the levy – the Treasury’s biggest single earner – into a ‘stealth wealth tax’, Civitas said.
The surge in state ‘dependency’ means the poorest fifth of households receive £17,600 more on average in welfare and non-financial benefits from the State than they pay in tax.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11664757/Over-half-households-State-pay-tax.html
Now IF someone can say WHY London has a train station named after a saint who was named after a (misspelled) bodily organ - St Pancr(e)as?
> One-third says half of all Brits are "something for nothing" spongers.
> One-third is desparately flogging DM for next-to-nothing (to said spongers with plenty of public pelf?)
> One-third apparently devoted to report of convention of Winston Churchill imitators, with modern UKR master giving pointers to UK wannabe.
In normal times, it's very simple:
- retirees are beneficiaries
- people on low incomes with children are beneficiaries
- households where everyone is out of work are beneficiaries
- households where someone has a long-term chronic illness or disability are beneficiaries
And that's about it.
If you don't have kids and you're in work, then you are almost certainly a net contributor, even if you're on minimum wage.
The country needs to move past him, but we shouldn't forget that he broadly got the big calls right.
* This may be too kind.
** Sadly, this did involve quite a lot of dissimulation ***
*** Or lying, as some would call it
So broadly, not really.
Also, given the string life science base of the country, and the advice given to government, would any other administration not have invested in vaccines ? Seems a bit unlikely.
Ukraine I give him credit for. That was a genuine call, and a correct one.
*Polling shows most of the country agreed with me.
On vaccines, it's a counterfactual so we can't ever truly know the alternative. But the UK did better earlier than others. Now, of course, the lead was a very short one, and pretty much everyone in the EU was done by summer 2021, but he did recognize the importance early and the UK did what they needed to.
I don't see how any of that amounts to "the right call" unless you're still one if the small band of believers in it all having worked out for the best.
And it has wasted a decade.
And to repeat, most of the country regrets the whole mess.
Certainly his early support of Ukraine was laudable, but as a discredited backbench MP shortly to be up before the Parliamentary Standards Committee, what help can he offer Ukraine now? Is his trip to Kyiv designed to help Ukraine, or himself?
Apart from changing demographics, with more pensioner households, such a drop in net contributors to the national finances demonstrates the hollowing out of Britain with the rich getting richer and the struggling middle struggling even more.
Worth noting too that in Dec 2019 a majority of the popular vote went to parties supporting a further referendum on Brexit.
To build the terminus, they had to destroy much of the graveyard of St Pancras church (now Old St Pancras church) - famous poet and author Thomas Hardy was involved with disinterring all the bodies whilst he was working as an architect.
So they had a choice to call their terminus 'Agar' after a slum, or 'St Pancras' after a saint. Unsurprisingly, they chose the latter, or you would be asking why a station was named after a gelatinous substance...
As for who St Pancras was: he is the patron saint of children:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancras_of_Rome
The word 'pancreas' apparently comes from the Greek for 'flesh'.
*) Britain could be a success within or without the EU.
*) Britain could be a failure within or without the EU.
Membership of the EU might make success easier or harder (depending on your viewpoint), but it is a small factor, not the cause.
*If* we are failing as a country, it has little to do with Brexit, but on a while host of structural issues that are firmly under our control. If we had voted to remain in 2016, we would not be much better off.
I'd also argue that pretending that all our issues are because of Brexit is singularly unhelpful, as it stops us examining those structural issues. It's the reverse of before Brexit, when Europhobes would blame all the country's failings on EU membership. That was nonsense. Likewise, it's nonsense to blame all the country's failings on the fact we left.
Nobody who voted for Brexit agrees what they voted for.
And thus enacting "it" is not what most people voted for.
And why people who did vote for Brexit are now loudly proclaiming this is not what they voted for.
There were any number of better ways to proceed than "Getting Brexit Done with BoZo's oven ready deal"
He will forever be vilified for that
(Perhaps they just didn't grasp the issues: I watched the debates on May's deal, and virtually every backbench MP standing up seemed to have at least one basic misunderstanding in their question)
And Boris is responsible, more than any other individual - both as instigator and saboteur - for how we have spent that decade.
But let's have a counterfactual: *if* we had voted remain, the Brexiteers would not have gone away, and it is likely that a 2019 or 2020 GE would have been dominated by talk of Europe - which was always a side issue. Like in the 92-97 parliament, the government would have been paralysed by Europe from within.
The problem is not Boris. The problem is not the EU. The problem is the way too many people on both sides take a relatively minor issue and project it into the MOST IMPORTANT issue facing the country.
It really is not.
Brexit has been poorly handled, but even if it had been well handled, there would have been slight damage. But Brexit is not about the first five years after the split; it is about the next couple of decades. And sadly, the government does not appear to be addressing that.
Lucy Powell, Shadow C… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617428565745713152
"The election of a Liberal Democrat majority government on a clear stop Brexit platform will provide a democratic mandate to stop this mess, revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. In other circumstances, we will continue to fight for a people’s vote with the option to stay in the EU, and in that vote we would passionately campaign to keep the UK in the EU"
https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/
Would Britain have really voted Leave if Brexiteers had been clear that Brexit would involve years or decades of economic damage? Even now Brexiteers struggle to name any concrete economic advantage.
IMV many of the issues come from the refusal of 'leave' to come up with a coherent plan *before* the vote. Instead, it was all vague and wishy-washy promises of sunny uplands. We're paying the consequences now.
Some of them are, that's obvious, and always have been. But it's the supermarkets who created the environment which drove so many farmers into the ground. And the supermarkets who have been so useless at reforming their own inefficiencies and thus trying to smash ever larger profit margins on cans of peas to cover their operational losses - something which efficient businesses like Aldi and Lidl don't suffer because they aren't as shitly run as Morrisons.
I think the absolute Icarus moment of my career so far was sitting at the Sainsbury's supplier conference where their Commercial Director stood on stage berating all the suppliers in the audience. Our crime was that we were trading with Aldi and Lidl. Destroying Value. Threatening profits. "IT'S YOUR FAULT" he ranted.
The consequences are deliberate.
According to Today Zahawi was simply “settling a tax dispute” with HMRC that resulted in him paying more tax.
('Last' seems over optimistic to me.)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/22/three-years-after-brexit-where-is-the-new-golden-age-that-they-promised-us
...The last and craziest hurrah of the Brextremists is the Retained EU Law bill, conceived by the ineffable Mr Rees-Mogg when he was still in the cabinet and Mr Johnson was still at Number 10. This proposes a mass cull of the EU laws that were turned into British law in the haste to get Brexit “done” and to do so by the end of this year – preserving only those laws that ministers choose to keep or adapt. The promoters of this undemocratic, rushed and reckless scheme are the same people who said that we had all the advantages in the withdrawal negotiations, that we would secure a superb deal and that Brexit would be brilliant for Britain. Now they propose a mission impossible, to review about 4,000 laws, covering everything from environmental protections to consumer rights, in less than a year at a time when the strains on the state are already acute. Business, the trade unions, civil servants and the government’s own assessor agree that it is madness...
But it's questionable whether there would have been a yes vote had there been a single prospectus.
I wonder what other support, like that from Bulgaria early on, has also been provided unobtrusively?
The mainstream campaign was that there is a huge flow of money going to Brussels which would be better spent on us (and not on them) here and now. Another bit of furniture we could chuck on the fire, another bag of seedcorn we could eat.
That's happened, but not left us transformatively happier. Partly because the amount of money involved wasn't as huge as was implied (see also Foreign Aid) but also because the membership fee unlocked benefits for the UK.
Sudan is one of the more unlikely providers of military aid to Ukraine.
Problem is that Leave only won because the Workers Republic of Britain voters supported Brexit so that they could get paid more and have better workplaces. What you want directly conflicts with what they want.
Which is why "BREXIT" would always fail long after we delivered Brexit - leaving the EU. I know that Rees-Mog and the spiv class want to be able to cut nanny-state red tape and worker protections, but the workers won't vote for you in thanks...
A bit like the way that British Airways tried to run a low cost airline in competition with itself, except that it worked.
So Vote Leave could do the "Farage goes too far, we love Europe but hate the EU" stuff, knowing that Leave.eu would pick up the "hate Europe and Europeans" voters anyway.
(I'd be surprised if it were deliberate, but in a one shot referendum, it worked brilliantly.)
It remains very odd Cameron did not require an alternative prospectus in the referendum, as it would've been both legitimate and helpful for his own side. Leave would almost certainly have lost.
But there we are.
Tony led the way. We don't need to delay things on immigration, they're only racists. The Tories were as bad. We told you from the beginning that it wasn't just an economic union, you should have listened better.
When was telling voters they were wrong and you know better ever a recipe for success?
To be fair, the EU have a better class of thieves. Bribing ministers with suitcases of notes is old-fashioned, but classy.
Johnson's Chancellor Zahawi negotiated a deal for unpaid taxes whilst he was in office, Johnson arranged for personal liquidity whilst PM which involved all kinds of odd arrangements with people with vested interests.
Yes Sunak is finished, not in small part due to Johnson's shenanigans, so enter PM Johnson stage right. It's a comedy of errors.
For those of us who can't see Emperor Johnson's new clothes his visits to Kyiv at moments of Sunakian weakness do look suspicious, but then I suppose if the side effect of Johnson's manouvres accelerate a Russian defeat, what's the harm in that.
"As of March 2022, the Vatican has sent two Cardinals to Ukraine to provide "material and spiritual support" to the Ukrainian people."
I get this image of Reverend Philip Shooter from Hot Fuzz...
" Stop! Stop this, please! Let us stop this mindless violence! Putin my son, you may not be a man of God, but surely you are a man of peace."
Before blasting away with their guns.
It remains the case that in 2016 no good outcome was available, due to 40 years of voter ignoring arrogance, and still that is so.
How would you stop them?
Because this was not the case, it was a lot easier to kick the EU, as politicians have not done a good job of making the case for it, the Lisbon deception did not engender voter trust, and the Leave campaign was able to make differing cases to different voters.
Mind you, if Remain had run a campaign that wasn't incredibly bad, they still would've won...
As a result parliament had a unique opportunity to serve the nation after the 2016 result by massively coalescing around a decent outcome without regard to political party. Well as it happens this didn't quite work,......
Tank warfare with modern tanks does require air superiority though, the Ukranians need to be able to fly the line and hold their airspace.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Pancras_Old_Church
A previously self-serving narcissist, who I was assured on this board yesterday has changed and is visiting Kyiv for purely altruistic purposes. Colour me skeptical.
And if the EU said "no, we're not giving you that", then that gives VL two brilliant ripostes. The first is "look how awful Brussels is", the other is "Of course they're saying that now, they want to trap us in their web. Once we've voted to leave, they'll come running..." (See German car makers.)
All totally dishonest, of course. But this is electoral politics, and sometimes the spoils go to the campaigner prepared to cross the line that bit more.
"We made an active de… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617447612688338944
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/earningsandemploymentfrompayasyouearnrealtimeinformationuk/january2023#pay-distribution
Whilst most of the country is struggling Zahawi apparently received 27 million pounds and didn’t pay any tax until forced to by the HMRC and refuses to resign.
The Tories deserve to get wiped out at the next election.