Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
I think the Labour ad is poor and has been designed to cause a furore . There were plenty of ads that could be done to attack the Tories on law and order which would have been far better .
Having said this the Tory MPs and their arse licking right wing press should stfu with the moral outrage .
Anyone saying though they’ll not vote Labour over an ill advised ad clearly wouldn’t be voting for them anyway .
Comparing 13 years of the cesspit Tories against one dodgy ad is hardly a fair equivalence.
No, but as with OGH, it reminds me that both large parties share responsibility for our political system and broken politics, and discourages me from voting for one of them just to get rid of the others.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
Sadly you are almost certainly correct.
I'm too comfortable and deeply rooted in this country (and lacking in the necessary marketable skills) to move abroad, however. I'm one of that class of well-to-do middle-aged people whose best hope is, therefore, that the creaking panjandrum of state rolls on for long enough that the implosion and subsequent reckoning only happens after husband and I have both departed peacefully through old age.
We're still under 50, so I'm not sure I fancy our chances, but we have no plan B. So I plod doggedly onwards.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
Sadly you are almost certainly correct.
I'm too comfortable and deeply rooted in this country (and lacking in the necessary marketable skills) to move abroad, however. I'm one of that class of well-to-do middle-aged people whose best hope is, therefore, that the creaking panjandrum of state rolls on for long enough that the implosion and subsequent reckoning only happens after husband and I have both departed peacefully through old age.
We're still under 50, so I'm not sure I fancy our chances, but we have no plan B. So I plod doggedly onwards.
If you are middle-aged, you probably own property. It’s not we middle-aged I feel for, it’s those who simply can’t get ahead because rent consumes an ever increasing percentage of their income. Britain is suffocating itself to death.
Anyone under the age of 40, unless seriously well-remunerated, should GTFO.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Me: "so WTF is Braverman doing in your cabinet ?"
She was, apparently, the only Tory who would be willing to be so tough on the boats. Despite all evidence to the contrary.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
It would work but ultimately the die has already been cast, the voters Labour are trying to reach already see Keith as a lefty lawyer and the Tories will absolutely paint him that way now given that he was the DPP who brought in the sentencing guidelines that Labour are campaigning against right now.
This is going to end very badly for them, all it does is lose them votes.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Me: "so WTF is Braverman doing in your cabinet ?"
Starmer campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to be PM, twice. It's politics.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Me: "so WTF is Braverman doing in your cabinet ?"
Starmer campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to be PM, twice. It's politics.
But Starmer did not put Corbyn in his Cabinet as part of some kind of lib-owning strategy.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
It would work but ultimately the die has already been cast, the voters Labour are trying to reach already see Keith as a lefty lawyer and the Tories will absolutely paint him that way now given that he was the DPP who brought in the sentencing guidelines that Labour are campaigning against right now.
This is going to end very badly for them, all it does is lose them votes.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
It would work but ultimately the die has already been cast, the voters Labour are trying to reach already see Keith as a lefty lawyer and the Tories will absolutely paint him that way now given that he was the DPP who brought in the sentencing guidelines that Labour are campaigning against right now.
This is going to end very badly for them, all it does is lose them votes.
We shall see.
We shall see but the omens are not looking good.
You raise me "Rishi Sunak didn't jail kiddie fiddlers" and I raise you "Starmer didn't prosecute Saville when he was DPP (oh, and set the guidelines) and, BTW, did you know some of his backers like calling paedos 'minor-attracted'"?
It might have been more powerful closer to an election but with an election 12-18 months out, it's - at best - shooting the bolt early and, at worst, panicking.
First, being here, I think it's increasingly likely Le Pen wins the next Presidential election. Macron is pushing ahead with the pension reforms as he wants to put his name in the history books. Nobody here I spoke to thinks he is doing a great job but he has both eviscerated the conservatives and socialists and not left a natural successor.
I think the run-off will be between Le Pen and Melanchon, and MLP will win the votes of the property owning middle classes who will say they don't won't Melenchon.
Secondly, for those who complain re London public transport, come to Paris. 17 minutes for a bus on one of Paris' main bus routes. Meanwhile the Metro is slow running.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Starmer: "I will be boring, an unknown and competent."
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
First, being here, I think it's increasingly likely Le Pen wins the next Presidential election. Macron is pushing ahead with the pension reforms as he wants to put his name in the history books. Nobody here I spoke to thinks he is doing a great job but he has both eviscerated the conservatives and socialists and not left a natural successor.
I think the run-off will be between Le Pen and Melanchon, and MLP will win the votes of the property owning middle classes who will say they don't won't Melenchon.
Secondly, for those who complain re London public transport, come to Paris. 17 minutes for a bus on one of Paris' main bus routes. Meanwhile the Metro is slow running.
I was there a few weeks ago and found the atmosphere a bit uncomfortable in certain places such as the main train stations. A lot of people wandering around aimlessly, the opposite of what you find in London in the same types of places, where most people seem to have something important to do, or go to..
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
There is a shortage of skilled workers in every country.
For example, a friend is working in IT in Copenhagen. He described his experience as interviewing companies to see if he wants to work for them.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Starmer: "I will be boring, an unknown and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring, familiar and competent."
Voters: "We're pissed off and we want change."
Labour: "Thanks to FPTP we're the only alternative you have and you know it."
If Sunak can get the electorate to vote for the status quo after the massive squeeze on living standards they're currently experiencing, and after the reputation-annihilating experience of the Truss Calamity, then he'd deserve a reputation as the greatest election-winner in British political history ever.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
First, being here, I think it's increasingly likely Le Pen wins the next Presidential election. Macron is pushing ahead with the pension reforms as he wants to put his name in the history books. Nobody here I spoke to thinks he is doing a great job but he has both eviscerated the conservatives and socialists and not left a natural successor.
I think the run-off will be between Le Pen and Melanchon, and MLP will win the votes of the property owning middle classes who will say they don't won't Melenchon.
Secondly, for those who complain re London public transport, come to Paris. 17 minutes for a bus on one of Paris' main bus routes. Meanwhile the Metro is slow running.
I was there a few weeks ago and found the atmosphere a bit uncomfortable in certain places such as the main train stations. A lot of people wandering around aimlessly, the opposite of what you find in London in the same types of places, where most people seem to have something important to do, or go to..
Paris has become, tragically, quite sketchy in a lot of places. This will fuel the Le Pen vote
Like others here, I can easily see her winning in the next election. Also, France is due a successful populist revolt of some kind
America, Italy and the UK have already been there. Three of the great nations of the west. I see no reason why France will resist the trend
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
There’s a shortage of labour worldwide.
Not quite - there’s no shortage of unskilled or subsistence farmers (in the poorest countries)
But as you go up true skill ladder the shortages start quite low down.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
Agree with *some* of that reply.
1 - Increasing fuel duty is not more taxes, it's a reversal of a real tax cut of 27% since 2011. In 2011 fuel duty was 57.95p/l. In 2023 it is 52.95 p/l. Now some of that is coming back post-Covid, but inflation since 2011 has been 37%.
2 - On Electric Cars, there is already Band B VED built in from 2025, which will be perhaps £180 each for 2-4 million electric cars, or £3-10 billion for the Chancellor. But he will lose some of that from the swapped-out ICE cars.
3 - Agree on a shift to asset taxes, but much of Starmer's base is wealthy London and similar groups. I'd be going for an annual Swiss style low-rate wide-base wealth tax, and a house value based property tax to fund Councils.
4 - I'm not sure what assets most CGT is raised from, but I'd apply it to main residences. Starmer won't.
5 - I think Corbyn was a little more than a whisker away - he lost almost 25% of the Labour seats in Parliament.
"Six police officers raid a pub and seize 15 golliwog dolls after customer made hate crime complaint
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
Some anecdotal impressions after a couple of days' intensive canvassing:
- The change from 2019 is less than you might expect from the polls. Labour is doing a bit better, Cons and LibDems slightly worse, but you have to look hard to spot any movement at all. - People are pretty disengaged. They are vaguely aware that local elections are happening, but they think we're all a bit screwed anyway and they aren't excited by any of the parties. - Insofar as anyone feels strongly, it's mostly the anti-Tory vote. Quite a lot of people want a change - not because they think things will get much better, but even loyal Tory voters concede it's time for the country to take a break from them. Tory membership is well down, and they've failed in my Blue Wall area to field a full slate of candidates.
So...I'd expect on current showing that Labour will make moderate gains, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if it's earth-shaking.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
There’s a shortage of labour worldwide.
Because they always run out of other people's money.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
There’s a shortage of labour worldwide.
Are you sure this is correct? I thought one of the main reasons for large-scale immigration across the world was lack of job opportunities in mamy poorer countries. For example North Africa.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
There can be both shortages of labour and high unemployment at the same time: it's entirely possible to have very few (for example) machine learning engineers relative to demand, while at the same time having far more dishwasher repair technicians than there is demand for.
It's what makes government policy so difficult: all too often the government lags the market, issuing visas people with skills long after a shortage has abated, while not recognising the existence of a shortage in another area.
We are also competing with other countries for skilled people. In London right now, there are posters encouraging trained doctors (and nurses) to depart for Australia and to earn substantially higher salaries.
I would also note that countries define unemployment differently (and I prefer to look at employment to working age population ratios). Nowhere is that clearer than in Spain during the Eurozone crisis, where the number of unemployed grew twice as fast as the decline in the number of people employed.
"Six police officers raid a pub and seize 15 golliwog dolls after customer made hate crime complaint
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Starmer: "I will be boring, an unknown and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring, familiar and competent."
Trouble for SKS is that Sunak isn't boring.
He might be nerdy and a bit of a swot, but nerdy is he not.
Starmer is trolling the Law and Order Party. If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
Not an argument that appeals to me, but I can see why Conservatives don't like the role reversal.
Do you think Labour do intend to change sentencing laws in the way they describe?
To be honest I haven't bothered to check. The general Labour line is that the Conservatives are useless because the number of people brought to trial is a lot lower than it should be due to the current governments not funding the justice system properly. Which is a reasonable argument. Whether Labour will improve funding remains to be seen.
This campaign isn't about reasonable argument however. But from a partisan glasshouses point of view perhaps both parties shouldn't throw stones.
I think the whole point of Labour using these attack points is that the last thing they want to do is to promise money for the criminal justice system in case they can’t find the money.
Hence the attacks are on “meaningless” things that don’t directly require money being spent
If you are promising to send people to prison you do have to spend money.
Will Labour spend the money on building new prisons, on the courts, effective police & the forensics support staff so that criminals get caught, tried & there are prisons for them to be sent to?
No. Thought not.
In which case this is deceitful talk and lies about who is responsible for sentencing guidelines, leavened with racist smears.
As far as I can tell Labour is just a changing of the guard.
Unless they're hiding something up their sleeve (i.e. massive increases in taxes) their "revenue-raising" and spending policies are extremely modest, and won't make a smidgen of a difference to anything.
Maybe they hope we won't notice or care once they've taken office.
Pretty much. Except that their core vote will notice when they keep on getting poorer, and Labour will end up even more unpopular than the Tories.
At least the Tory core vote (the rich and the middle-class aged) get buttered up when their party's in power, with the triple lock and tax breaks. Public sector workers will get the same old excuses from Labour as to why they can't have decent pay rises, and those on the lower half of the income scale will continue to suffer shite public services, and ever-higher taxation via fiscal drag, to foot the bill for increases in pensioner benefits.
We all see it coming from a mile off. A Labour Government will just end up reshuffling the deck chairs.
I'd say significant increases in tax and borrowing - eg taxes from electric motor vehicles (to maintain the revenue that used to come from ICE vehicles) and ICE vehicles (to encourage for environmental reasons the move to electric).
There's about £30 bn or more of low hanging fruit pa just in that.
So fuel duty escalator, "now that we have recovered from COVID".
Applying the hammer of more taxes to motor vehicles (which huge numbers of people, including millions on low incomes, cannot manage without) is little better than simply extracting an ever-rising percentage of people's earned incomes to plug gaps in the budget. What's needed is a far more thoroughgoing reform of the tax system, centred on shifting the burden from incomes to assets.
The most effective way for Labour to help its own core vote, rather than that of the Tories, is to cut income tax and implement enormous increases in asset taxation. If, now that pensioner households have more disposable income than working age households, they still refuse to abandon the triple lock, then fine - just so long as land value taxes and huge hikes in IHT are used to bleed the necessary cash back out of the well-off elderly, rather than utterly immiserating their grandkids. Equalising CGT rates with income tax rates is an immediate necessity, as is a wealth tax.
Labour's massive mistake in all of this is to uphold the status quo because it thinks it can only win by a direct appeal to the wallets of the Tories' own vote, and that means promising a continuation of Tory policy in almost every area - just with a few cosmetic irrelevances designed to make it look as if change has arrived when all they are doing is offering more of the same whilst enjoying their ministerial salaries and limos. They have entirely forgotten that even a candidate as patently unsuitable as Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of vanquishing a Conservative Government by offering hope to Labour's natural sympathisers and getting them to turn out in large numbers.
If Labour is just going to ape George Osborne and offer yet more austerity, in order that wealthy people get to keep all their money and pass their estates onto their heirs intact, then what is the earthly point of it? Do they want to effect actual, meaningful social change or are they just self-serving office seekers?
I reckon they'll turn out to be the latter. Watch.
The problem is that much of the "wealth" you describe is in the form of not especially large houses.
Forcing people to move from 3 bed semis via property taxes is not the look Labour is er.... looking for. Especially since the people buying the properties will be wealthier than the sellers.
What the UK needs is a reduction in value of property. The only way to let the air out of those tires, politically, is building enough property that property *rises* fall behind inflation.
Mass housebuilding (which ought hopefully to help house prices to stabilise, and give wages a chance to rise faster than them in future,) is a necessity. But it will also take many years to have any measurable effect. Distressed people on low incomes and public services struggling to recruit and retain staff because they keep running off to stack shelves in Aldi need relief immediately, not in 2035 or 2040. If we are to help the people most in need and repair the damage to public services and the public finances alike, then we must tax incomes a bit less and tax assets an awful lot more to compensate.
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
People talk a lot about emigrating. But the question is, why would another country want you?
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
There can be both shortages of labour and high unemployment at the same time: it's entirely possible to have very few (for example) machine learning engineers relative to demand, while at the same time having far more dishwasher repair technicians than there is demand for.
It's what makes government policy so difficult: all too often the government lags the market, issuing visas people with skills long after a shortage has abated, while not recognising the existence of a shortage in another area.
We are also competing with other countries for skilled people. In London right now, there are posters encouraging trained doctors (and nurses) to depart for Australia and to earn substantially higher salaries.
I would also note that countries define unemployment differently (and I prefer to look at employment to working age population ratios). Nowhere is that clearer than in Spain during the Eurozone crisis, where the number of unemployed grew twice as fast as the decline in the number of people employed.
There's a far higher number of Britons that exercise movement to Australia today (which has no free movement deal with us, of course) than were ever interested in exercising their movement choice to the EU when it was freely available.
We tend to be interested in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Some of the USA - but only really the wealthiest.
If South Africa was stable, safe and racially calm that might be true of there too - but it isn't, so it isn't.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Starmer: "I will be boring and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
Starmer: "I will be boring, an unknown and competent."
Sunak: "I am boring, familiar and competent."
Voters: "We're pissed off and we want change."
Labour: "Thanks to FPTP we're the only alternative you have and you know it."
If Sunak can get the electorate to vote for the status quo after the massive squeeze on living standards they're currently experiencing, and after the reputation-annihilating experience of the Truss Calamity, then he'd deserve a reputation as the greatest election-winner in British political history ever.
I think voters will pick the lesser of two evils for the next 4-5 years when the choice is before them.
The Tories have never been particularly popular as a brand, and many of its MPs make damn sure to keep that the case, but is Sunak is leading, delivering and has a plan - and all Starmer does is cynically follow a playbook, and where he thinks public opinion is going - then it might not be the slam dunk he thinks it will.
"Six police officers raid a pub and seize 15 golliwog dolls after customer made hate crime complaint
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
"Six police officers raid a pub and seize 15 golliwog dolls after customer made hate crime complaint
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
Listening to Farming Today and it appears the CPTPP will allow Mexico to sell eggs (unlikely) and egg products (very likely) to the UK, tariff free. Mexico is a very large egg producer and has no welfare laws at all and as a consequence significant undercuts us (29%). This is directly opposite Gove's promise. The government response is that they will talk to Mexico about their welfare of chickens. Yep that will work.
Listening to Farming Today and it appears the CPTPP will allow Mexico to sell eggs (unlikely) and egg products (very likely) to the UK, tariff free. Mexico is a very large egg producer and has no welfare laws at all and as a consequence significant undercuts us (29%). This is directly opposite Gove's promise. The government response is that they will talk to Mexico about their welfare of chickens. Yep that will work.
Given how free-range eggs with the British lion red mark have pushed out virtually everything else in the supermarkets, as a sign of both welfare standards and quality, why would this be a problem?
If consumers don't want to buy Mexican eggs due to quality concerns then they won't. This will provide an incentive for Mexicans to improve their welfare standards if they want to sell their eggs.
More than anything else this shows that Labour are extremely worried about Rishi. For good reason, he's completely destroyed Starmer's USP of boring competence.
Listening to Farming Today and it appears the CPTPP will allow Mexico to sell eggs (unlikely) and egg products (very likely) to the UK, tariff free. Mexico is a very large egg producer and has no welfare laws at all and as a consequence significant undercuts us (29%). This is directly opposite Gove's promise. The government response is that they will talk to Mexico about their welfare of chickens. Yep that will work.
Given how free-range eggs with the British lion red mark have pushed out virtually everything else in the supermarkets, as a sign of both welfare standards and quality, why would this be a problem?
If consumers don't want to buy Mexican eggs due to quality concerns then they won't. This will provide an incentive for Mexicans to improve their welfare standards if they want to sell their eggs.
Market forces.
You missed the specific point made. Nobody is going to buy mexican eggs. It is too far to come. Need to read what I said. They will be buying egg products. You know where the majority of eggs are used and will be none the wiser. The mexican eggs will be in other products which is a huge market. Nobody checks these
* The long-term trend of increasing life expectancy stalled and practically flatlined at around the same time as Cameron and Osborne started their austerity drive in 2010 * A handful of outperforming London boroughs excepted, there is an almost perfect correlation between life expectancy in a local authority and its level of deprivation * Experts reckon that 40% of the burden on the NHS may be preventable through tackling the causes of avoidable chronic conditions. But in 2020 less than 7% of overall government health-care spending went on prevention, a third of that on covid testing and tracing * Such services have been pruned in the last decade. Since 2013 public health in England has come under the purview of local authorities. The public health grant, which is paid to councils by the Department of Health, was cut by 24% in real terms per person between 2015-16 and 2021-22 * Having failed to prevent illnesses in the first place, shortfalls in medical care then take their toll - partly because poorer people tend to seek help later to begin with, and partly because of the general state of decrepitude of the NHS and resultant delays in treatment
More poverty, more cuts, more corpses. The prosperity of the rich in contemporary Britain is built upon the graves of the poor. Quelle surprise.
Listening to Farming Today and it appears the CPTPP will allow Mexico to sell eggs (unlikely) and egg products (very likely) to the UK, tariff free. Mexico is a very large egg producer and has no welfare laws at all and as a consequence significant undercuts us (29%). This is directly opposite Gove's promise. The government response is that they will talk to Mexico about their welfare of chickens. Yep that will work.
Given how free-range eggs with the British lion red mark have pushed out virtually everything else in the supermarkets, as a sign of both welfare standards and quality, why would this be a problem?
If consumers don't want to buy Mexican eggs due to quality concerns then they won't. This will provide an incentive for Mexicans to improve their welfare standards if they want to sell their eggs.
Market forces.
You missed the specific point made. Nobody is going to buy mexican eggs. It is too far to come. Need to read what I said. They will be buying egg products. You know where the majority of eggs are used and will be none the wiser. The mexican eggs will be in other products which is a huge market. Nobody checks these
And British consumers will be happy that prices are falling in some part of their weekly food bill.
On topic - The Tories use Guido and the right wing press for this kind of thing for a reason. It creates a deniability distance between themselves and the dogwhistle. This is not only deeply unpleasant from Labour, it is also politically stupid.
Listening to Farming Today and it appears the CPTPP will allow Mexico to sell eggs (unlikely) and egg products (very likely) to the UK, tariff free. Mexico is a very large egg producer and has no welfare laws at all and as a consequence significant undercuts us (29%). This is directly opposite Gove's promise. The government response is that they will talk to Mexico about their welfare of chickens. Yep that will work.
Given how free-range eggs with the British lion red mark have pushed out virtually everything else in the supermarkets, as a sign of both welfare standards and quality, why would this be a problem?
If consumers don't want to buy Mexican eggs due to quality concerns then they won't. This will provide an incentive for Mexicans to improve their welfare standards if they want to sell their eggs.
Market forces.
You missed the specific point made. Nobody is going to buy mexican eggs. It is too far to come. Need to read what I said. They will be buying egg products. You know where the majority of eggs are used and will be none the wiser. The mexican eggs will be in other products which is a huge market. Nobody checks these
And British consumers will be happy that prices are falling in some part of their weekly food bill.
Ah ok we are not concerned about cruelty to animals (where do you draw the line?) or specific promises by made by the Gove that this will not happen then? And our farmers have to comply so stuff them as well then.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
Listening to Farming Today and it appears the CPTPP will allow Mexico to sell eggs (unlikely) and egg products (very likely) to the UK, tariff free. Mexico is a very large egg producer and has no welfare laws at all and as a consequence significant undercuts us (29%). This is directly opposite Gove's promise. The government response is that they will talk to Mexico about their welfare of chickens. Yep that will work.
Given how free-range eggs with the British lion red mark have pushed out virtually everything else in the supermarkets, as a sign of both welfare standards and quality, why would this be a problem?
If consumers don't want to buy Mexican eggs due to quality concerns then they won't. This will provide an incentive for Mexicans to improve their welfare standards if they want to sell their eggs.
Market forces.
"pushed out virtually everything else" is a bit wide of the mark. Government statistics for 2022 show that 28% of all eggs sold in the UK came from 'enriched cage' birds. There is clearly still a large market for battery hen eggs - from consumers who don't care about welfare, or cannot afford the luxury of caring - and in theory this is available to be captured by producers in jurisdictions where production costs are lower.
In practice we're not about to start importing fresh eggs from Mexico, but @kjh may well be right about the market for processed egg products. They're going to be used in other products rather than being sold direct to the consumer, and the number of shoppers who are going to scan the small print on products such as cakes to try to work out if they contain Mexican eggs is negligible. Thus, the notion that zero welfare Mexican egg will find its way onto our plates, because food manufacturers want the cheapest ingredients possible, is wholly plausible.
* The long-term trend of increasing life expectancy stalled and practically flatlined at around the same time as Cameron and Osborne started their austerity drive in 2010 * A handful of outperforming London boroughs excepted, there is an almost perfect correlation between life expectancy in a local authority and its level of deprivation * Experts reckon that 40% of the burden on the NHS may be preventable through tackling the causes of avoidable chronic conditions. But in 2020 less than 7% of overall government health-care spending went on prevention, a third of that on covid testing and tracing * Such services have been pruned in the last decade. Since 2013 public health in England has come under the purview of local authorities. The public health grant, which is paid to councils by the Department of Health, was cut by 24% in real terms per person between 2015-16 and 2021-22 * Having failed to prevent illnesses in the first place, shortfalls in medical care then take their toll - partly because poorer people tend to seek help later to begin with, and partly because of the general state of decrepitude of the NHS and resultant delays in treatment
More poverty, more cuts, more corpses. The prosperity of the rich in contemporary Britain is built upon the graves of the poor. Quelle surprise.
Genuine question. Most European countries pushed through big cuts in public spending in 2010/14 (in the case of Ireland and the Club Med, a lot more stringent than our own). Overall health spending in the UK, is similar to the European average, both in per capita terms, and as a share of GDP.
So, why did they fare better? Better public health? Less obesity? Fewer addictions? Using public money more wisely? Focusing more on chronic, rather than acute, treatments?
"Six police officers raid a pub and seize 15 golliwog dolls after customer made hate crime complaint
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
"Six police officers raid a pub and seize 15 golliwog dolls after customer made hate crime complaint
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
Interesting news about the Tories abolishing housing targets. In essence backbenchers have been screaming about this for ages - no more houses where my voters live - and have won.
It is the very best of narrow-minded nimbyism which supposedly was only something the LDs do. Question is how the Tories ensure their patrons make enough £ from what does get buultz but I'm sure they'll find a way.
On topic - The Tories use Guido and the right wing press for this kind of thing for a reason. It creates a deniability distance between themselves and the dogwhistle. This is not only deeply unpleasant from Labour, it is also politically stupid.
Interesting news about the Tories abolishing housing targets. In essence backbenchers have been screaming about this for ages - no more houses where my voters live - and have won.
It is the very best of narrow-minded nimbyism which supposedly was only something the LDs do. Question is how the Tories ensure their patrons make enough £ from what does get buultz but I'm sure they'll find a way.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
Interesting news about the Tories abolishing housing targets. In essence backbenchers have been screaming about this for ages - no more houses where my voters live - and have won.
It is the very best of narrow-minded nimbyism which supposedly was only something the LDs do. Question is how the Tories ensure their patrons make enough £ from what does get buultz but I'm sure they'll find a way.
I don't know who supposed that nimbyism was something only LDs do. All parties do it, and always have done, which is why we have such ridiculous planning laws in this country and have done for almost a century.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
Oh, I agree. And, as per my previous post, Labour lacks the relationships with the media that allow the Tories deniability when launching these attacks - but at some point the issues have to be tackled. When you’re only interested in point scoring and slurs you’re strongly suggesting you’re not interested in solving them. Labour would do well not to take voters for fools. The Tories have been doing it for years and people are sick of it. I think we should trust them on this.
Interesting news about the Tories abolishing housing targets. In essence backbenchers have been screaming about this for ages - no more houses where my voters live - and have won.
It is the very best of narrow-minded nimbyism which supposedly was only something the LDs do. Question is how the Tories ensure their patrons make enough £ from what does get buultz but I'm sure they'll find a way.
I am sure the Lib Dems are in favour of building houses - but they must the right sort of houses, built in places where people want them. That is what planning is all about.
The mad scramble to build expensive houses (often second homes) in rural communities is not what local people want. In contrast, some Lib Dem administrations have found a way to start building council houses again- for local people. And to this there is no local objection whatsoever.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
Agree.
I dislike the advert because just because the Tories have gone into the gutter, I don’t think Labour should follow them. A large part of why Labour appeals to me at the moment is the air of decency.
It also, as I said yesterday, reminds me of the more populist authoritarianism of New Labour (we’re tougher than you!) which was one of my biggest dislikes of that government.
I see the responses to my report from 'Farming Today' got a like. I'm just wondering what part of those responses are liked. Would it be:
a) The increase in cruelty to chickens
or
b) The creation of an unfair marketplace for our farmers who have to comply with the welfare requirements whereas Mexican farmers don't (because mexico has no welfare laws)
or
c) Gove breaking his promise that this will never happen
Presumably it is
d) egg based products will be cheaper, but at the cost of all of the above.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
I always enjoy your posts. You are one of the most persuasive anti Tory anti Brexit posters on here. Both causes close to my heart.
But I'm puzzled.
You have said in the past you voted Brexit and now you have said you're not voting Labour. On the face of it this sounds very Alice in Wonderland.
Maybe like the best advertisers you don't have to believe in the products you're selling just be creative enough to persuade others to?
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
Who makes their lives hell when the Tories have few or no local councillors in large cities - and where for decades Labour has treated inner cities as their own personal fiefdoms? How did the last 13 years of Blair and Brown's Labour erode that slow descent into hell?
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
I always enjoy your posts. You are one of the most persuasive anti Tory anti Brexit posters on here. Both causes close to my heart.
But I'm puzzled.
You have said in the past you voted Brexit and now you have said you're not voting Labour. On the face of it this sounds very Alice in Wonderland.
Maybe like the best advertisers you don't have to believe in the products you're selling just be creative enough to persuade others to?
Two issues: 1. Brexit. I made a judgement that as we were never joining the Euro/Schengen etc that we would be propelled out of the inner EU by them anyway. Lots of talk of a twin track or two speed Europe back then. I assumed we wouldn't be mentalist and quit the EEA as well. I was naive and stupid. Mea Maxima Culpa. 2. Voting Labour where I live would be a massive waste of a vote. I'm sure there will be a Labour candidate but the local pro-sheep independent risks getting more vote. On the new boundaries my new seat is mostly Gordon. So I'll be voting and campaigning to regain the seat for the LibDems
Some anecdotal impressions after a couple of days' intensive canvassing:
- The change from 2019 is less than you might expect from the polls. Labour is doing a bit better, Cons and LibDems slightly worse, but you have to look hard to spot any movement at all. - People are pretty disengaged. They are vaguely aware that local elections are happening, but they think we're all a bit screwed anyway and they aren't excited by any of the parties. - Insofar as anyone feels strongly, it's mostly the anti-Tory vote. Quite a lot of people want a change - not because they think things will get much better, but even loyal Tory voters concede it's time for the country to take a break from them. Tory membership is well down, and they've failed in my Blue Wall area to field a full slate of candidates.
So...I'd expect on current showing that Labour will make moderate gains, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if it's earth-shaking.
Would now be a good moment for an opportunistic careerist to join the Tories?
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
Is this one of those elite threads that are by invitation only? Or is it your thread about cricket which appears as an old thread but has no comments? People don't have to work this hard to confuse me at this time on a Saturday morning.
Is this one of those elite threads that are by invitation only? Or is it your thread about cricket which appears as an old thread but has no comments? People don't have to work this hard to confuse me at this time on a Saturday morning.
Interesting news about the Tories abolishing housing targets. In essence backbenchers have been screaming about this for ages - no more houses where my voters live - and have won.
It is the very best of narrow-minded nimbyism which supposedly was only something the LDs do. Question is how the Tories ensure their patrons make enough £ from what does get buultz but I'm sure they'll find a way.
More that a previous Gove announcement, that councils wouldn't get into trouble for not planning where to build houses, has led to councils acting rationally and not planning where to build houses.
The more I read how Labour have got it so wrong with the "Lock Up Nonces" tweet, the more I know it is doing its job.
Morning all! I agree Sandy - 'how dare Labour call out the Tories like this' means that people are talking about it. The Tories making your neighbours less safe message is something the red wall already know about in detail, this just elevates it as an issue before anyone tried to distract them with dog whistle nonsense
The sexual abuse of children is not a subject political parties should be seeking to score points on. It’s wrong when the Tories do it. It’s equally wrong when Labour does. This is a long-standing, deep-seated, hugely complex subject, that the authorities have handled appallingly since time immemorial. It will not be dealt with properly until politicians start taking it seriously. We now know that neither main party is. It’s just not good enough. That is especially so since this should be an area where consensus can readily be found.
I'm not voting Labour anyway so it won't put me off them. And whilst I agree with your basic point, you could say the same about various other issues which shouldn't be politicised - but are by the Tories.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
The criminals.
People choose to commit crime.
Conservatives can be somewhat naive about the incumbency effect. "COVID vaccines were invented on our watch, we are rightly claiming credit". "It's not fair, double figure inflation isn't our fault, it's Putin's invasion of Ukraine that caused it".
I too am in despair, had decided to vote tactically for Labour in a constituency that had a Labour MP from 1997 to 2010. Only alternative are the Lib Dems who will poll under 10%. Might as well abstain. Tories are a rabble and Labour trying to emulate them.
Comments
The best bet at this stage is probably to emigrate.
Sunak: "I am boring and competent."
I'm too comfortable and deeply rooted in this country (and lacking in the necessary marketable skills) to move abroad, however. I'm one of that class of well-to-do middle-aged people whose best hope is, therefore, that the creaking panjandrum of state rolls on for long enough that the implosion and subsequent reckoning only happens after husband and I have both departed peacefully through old age.
We're still under 50, so I'm not sure I fancy our chances, but we have no plan B. So I plod doggedly onwards.
Anyone under the age of 40, unless seriously well-remunerated, should GTFO.
This is going to end very badly for them, all it does is lose them votes.
You raise me "Rishi Sunak didn't jail kiddie fiddlers" and I raise you "Starmer didn't prosecute Saville when he was DPP (oh, and set the guidelines) and, BTW, did you know some of his backers like calling paedos 'minor-attracted'"?
It might have been more powerful closer to an election but with an election 12-18 months out, it's - at best - shooting the bolt early and, at worst, panicking.
We shall see.
First, being here, I think it's increasingly likely Le Pen wins the next Presidential election. Macron is pushing ahead with the pension reforms as he wants to put his name in the history books. Nobody here I spoke to thinks he is doing a great job but he has both eviscerated the conservatives and socialists and not left a natural successor.
I think the run-off will be between Le Pen and Melanchon, and MLP will win the votes of the property owning middle classes who will say they don't won't Melenchon.
Secondly, for those who complain re London public transport, come to Paris. 17 minutes for a bus on one of Paris' main bus routes. Meanwhile the Metro is slow running.
Sunak: "I am boring, familiar and competent."
You generally of course. Not directed at anybody in particular.
For example, a friend is working in IT in Copenhagen. He described his experience as interviewing companies to see if he wants to work for them.
Labour: "Thanks to FPTP we're the only alternative you have and you know it."
If Sunak can get the electorate to vote for the status quo after the massive squeeze on living standards they're currently experiencing, and after the reputation-annihilating experience of the Truss Calamity, then he'd deserve a reputation as the greatest election-winner in British political history ever.
Like others here, I can easily see her winning in the next election. Also, France is due a successful populist revolt of some kind
America, Italy and the UK have already been there. Three of the great nations of the west. I see no reason why France will resist the trend
But as you go up true skill ladder the shortages start quite low down.
1 - Increasing fuel duty is not more taxes, it's a reversal of a real tax cut of 27% since 2011.
In 2011 fuel duty was 57.95p/l. In 2023 it is 52.95 p/l. Now some of that is coming back post-Covid, but inflation since 2011 has been 37%.
2 - On Electric Cars, there is already Band B VED built in from 2025, which will be perhaps £180 each for 2-4 million electric cars, or £3-10 billion for the Chancellor. But he will lose some of that from the swapped-out ICE cars.
3 - Agree on a shift to asset taxes, but much of Starmer's base is wealthy London and similar groups. I'd be going for an annual Swiss style low-rate wide-base wealth tax, and a house value based property tax to fund Councils.
4 - I'm not sure what assets most CGT is raised from, but I'd apply it to main residences. Starmer won't.
5 - I think Corbyn was a little more than a whisker away - he lost almost 25% of the Labour seats in Parliament.
Benice Ryley, 61, was quizzed by six officers after police received an anonymous complaint about The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex. She and husband Chris, 64, who is currently abroad, had displayed their collection of 15 dolls after receiving them as gifts from customers over the years."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11949421/Moment-six-police-officers-raid-Essex-pub-seize-15-golliwog-dolls.html
- The change from 2019 is less than you might expect from the polls. Labour is doing a bit better, Cons and LibDems slightly worse, but you have to look hard to spot any movement at all.
- People are pretty disengaged. They are vaguely aware that local elections are happening, but they think we're all a bit screwed anyway and they aren't excited by any of the parties.
- Insofar as anyone feels strongly, it's mostly the anti-Tory vote. Quite a lot of people want a change - not because they think things will get much better, but even loyal Tory voters concede it's time for the country to take a break from them. Tory membership is well down, and they've failed in my Blue Wall area to field a full slate of candidates.
So...I'd expect on current showing that Labour will make moderate gains, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if it's earth-shaking.
"Why did 250,000 Britons die sooner than expected?
Life expectancy in Britain has flatlined in the last ten years"
https://www.economist.com/interactive/britain/2023/03/09/why-did-250000-britons-die-sooner-than-expected
South Africa - unemployment 29%
Botswana - 25%
Namibia - 19%
Sudan - 19%
Libya - 19%
Zimbabe - 17%
Spain - 16%
Greece - 16%
Colombia - 15%
Brazil - 14%
It's what makes government policy so difficult: all too often the government lags the market, issuing visas people with skills long after a shortage has abated, while not recognising the existence of a shortage in another area.
We are also competing with other countries for skilled people. In London right now, there are posters encouraging trained doctors (and nurses) to depart for Australia and to earn substantially higher salaries.
I would also note that countries define unemployment differently (and I prefer to look at employment to working age population ratios). Nowhere is that clearer than in Spain during the Eurozone crisis, where the number of unemployed grew twice as fast as the decline in the number of people employed.
He might be nerdy and a bit of a swot, but nerdy is he not.
We tend to be interested in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Some of the USA - but only really the wealthiest.
If South Africa was stable, safe and racially calm that might be true of there too - but it isn't, so it isn't.
The Tories have never been particularly popular as a brand, and many of its MPs make damn sure to keep that the case, but is Sunak is leading, delivering and has a plan - and all Starmer does is cynically follow a playbook, and where he thinks public opinion is going - then it might not be the slam dunk he thinks it will.
What better way to show to your colleagues how anti-racist you are than volunteering to go on a golliwog raid?
If consumers don't want to buy Mexican eggs due to quality concerns then they won't. This will provide an incentive for Mexicans to improve their welfare standards if they want to sell their eggs.
Market forces.
* A handful of outperforming London boroughs excepted, there is an almost perfect correlation between life expectancy in a local authority and its level of deprivation
* Experts reckon that 40% of the burden on the NHS may be preventable through tackling the causes of avoidable chronic conditions. But in 2020 less than 7% of overall government health-care spending went on prevention, a third of that on covid testing and tracing
* Such services have been pruned in the last decade. Since 2013 public health in England has come under the purview of local authorities. The public health grant, which is paid to councils by the Department of Health, was cut by 24% in real terms per person between 2015-16 and 2021-22
* Having failed to prevent illnesses in the first place, shortfalls in medical care then take their toll - partly because poorer people tend to seek help later to begin with, and partly because of the general state of decrepitude of the NHS and resultant delays in treatment
More poverty, more cuts, more corpses. The prosperity of the rich in contemporary Britain is built upon the graves of the poor. Quelle surprise.
In practice we're not about to start importing fresh eggs from Mexico, but @kjh may well be right about the market for processed egg products. They're going to be used in other products rather than being sold direct to the consumer, and the number of shoppers who are going to scan the small print on products such as cakes to try to work out if they contain Mexican eggs is negligible. Thus, the notion that zero welfare Mexican egg will find its way onto our plates, because food manufacturers want the cheapest ingredients possible, is wholly plausible.
Market forces.
So, why did they fare better? Better public health? Less obesity? Fewer addictions? Using public money more wisely? Focusing more on chronic, rather than acute, treatments?
It is the very best of narrow-minded nimbyism which supposedly was only something the LDs do. Question is how the Tories ensure their patrons make enough £ from what does get buultz but I'm sure they'll find a way.
Most PB Tories haven't a clue what it's like to live in crime-ridden shitholes. Their red wall voters do, but after more than a decade of a criminal justice system on its knees they want to get people to vote for the party of crime because Labour are wobbly on what a woman is.
Labour are trying - very crudely - to remind these voters who made their lives hell.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/08/wales-to-conserve-ruins-of-medieval-court-llys-rhosyr-for-public-visits
The mad scramble to build expensive houses (often second homes) in rural communities is not what local people want. In contrast, some Lib Dem administrations have found a way to start building council houses again- for local people. And to this there is no local objection whatsoever.
I dislike the advert because just because the Tories have gone into the gutter, I don’t think Labour should follow them. A large part of why Labour appeals to me at the moment is the air of decency.
It also, as I said yesterday, reminds me of the more populist authoritarianism of New Labour (we’re tougher than you!) which was one of my biggest dislikes of that government.
a) The increase in cruelty to chickens
or
b) The creation of an unfair marketplace for our farmers who have to comply with the welfare requirements whereas Mexican farmers don't (because mexico has no welfare laws)
or
c) Gove breaking his promise that this will never happen
Presumably it is
d) egg based products will be cheaper, but at the cost of all of the above.
But I'm puzzled.
You have said in the past you voted Brexit and now you have said you're not voting Labour. On the face of it this sounds very Alice in Wonderland.
Maybe like the best advertisers you don't have to believe in the products you're selling just be creative enough to persuade others to?
It didn't.
new thread
which contains valuable advice for @Northern_Al1. Brexit. I made a judgement that as we were never joining the Euro/Schengen etc that we would be propelled out of the inner EU by them anyway. Lots of talk of a twin track or two speed Europe back then. I assumed we wouldn't be mentalist and quit the EEA as well. I was naive and stupid. Mea Maxima Culpa.
2. Voting Labour where I live would be a massive waste of a vote. I'm sure there will be a Labour candidate but the local pro-sheep independent risks getting more vote. On the new boundaries my new seat is mostly Gordon. So I'll be voting and campaigning to regain the seat for the LibDems
People choose to commit crime.
THIS THEAD HAS BEEN HIT FOR SIX.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cb2c6e10-d574-11ed-a308-364551a39b53?shareToken=1e69d113a498b02641c2528333421efd
More that a previous Gove announcement, that councils wouldn't get into trouble for not planning where to build houses, has led to councils acting rationally and not planning where to build houses.