So I wake up to news that Mason Greenwood has been signed by Getafe on a loan deal where Manchester United continue to pay his wages.
So the carefully-worded statement saying that all sides agree that he should rebuild his career away from Old Trafford was just more smoke-blowing. We haven't dispensed with his services at all. Its just pathetic management.
While I understand your comments I suspect employment law is playing ( excuse the pun) a part in this as his contract is to 2025
Why? Bringing the club into disrepute. Gross Misconduct. Contract terminated.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
Lovely warm early autumn weather here in the Maconnais where we’re at the place for some building site meetings, notary palavas and a silver wedding anniversary weekend at Chateau de Bagnols just south in Beaujolais.
29C today. 31C tomorrow. And it’s on its way North to Blighty by Sunday.
8th warmest summer on record for the UK. 33rd warmest for central England in a series going back more than 350 years. Not bad, even though it felt so. We forget just how shit the long term average British weather is.
Have to admit I am surprised about that. Lincolnshire ha definitely been a lot coller this summer than any I can remember in the last decade at least. Only a single night when it was actually reasonably warm. I judge these things based on the suitability for moth trapping and I have had very few good nights this year as far as warm temperatures go. I am hoping for a warmer September so I can get a better handle on how the moth numbers are looking compared to previous years.
I think you’ve had the worst of it in Lincs this year. I remember back in June when we had those unbroken weeks of hot sunshine, very often the morning weather forecast would finish with “except the Lincs coast, which will be under cloud with a cold breeze from the North Sea”.
Still, at least you have the consultation of living in the murk surrounded by all your Brexit chums….
I also have a suspicion this summer’s scored very poorly on the weekend:weekday good weather ratio, especially in July and August. Many days around 25-26C in the SE during the working week and some stinkers at the weekend. I must have a go at the calculations.
The GFS model has UK maxes above 25C for 9 consecutive days coming up, and above 30C for 5 days from this Wednesday. If it happens it’s going to be a shock to the system.
Crap summer in Scotland this year, only May was decent
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
Two reasons.
Main one is Prisoner's Dilemma. The temptation to make a deal like that and then he the first one to break it, leaving the other lot holding the poonami'd baby, would be too big to ignore.
The other one is that it would only take one external populist to bring that down. "LABCON are just the same as each other, telling you lies to keep you poor..." Don't think that can be done? Ask Nigel Farage.
It's an unfortunate bit of Hunan nature, but something about Britain and our system magnifies it. Did anyone ask Nigel Lawson if his tax cuts were sustainable? Or did we all say "thanks for the extra dosh"?
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
You’ve said this before, but I don’t see where your figures come from. Can you give citations to ONS figures?
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Would be difficult with Mr Starmer if he keeps his promises to freeze to so many current tax levels.
Didn't the old chuff-fart rule out a wealth tax in any form?
I see a 'turns out the problems are even worse than we thought because of Tory incompetence, sadly we must u turn' moment coming.
I hope so. Starmer is in serious danger of promising too little.
On the other side for Starmer, he stands a chance of getting a good fall in interest payments giving him some headroom within current spending levels.
Recent Govt interest payments have jumped by approx £50bn per annum, which is 7% or so of Govt expenditure. If, as forecast, there is a corresponding reduction after the next Election, that would be headroom for Mr Starmer.
There are also all kinds of necessary tax reforms delayed until after the Election that the current Govt are too cowardly to tackle now (raising revenue from Electric Vehicles is one obvious one), in the hope of buying some votes. Is there more leeway there?
At present imo he is making similar mistakes to Mr Brown - "we'll follow Tory policies".
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
Two reasons.
Main one is Prisoner's Dilemma. The temptation to make a deal like that and then he the first one to break it, leaving the other lot holding the poonami'd baby, would be too big to ignore.
The other one is that it would only take one external populist to bring that down. "LABCON are just the same as each other, telling you lies to keep you poor..." Don't think that can be done? Ask Nigel Farage.
It's an unfortunate bit of Hunan nature, but something about Britain and our system magnifies it. Did anyone ask Nigel Lawson if his tax cuts were sustainable? Or did we all say "thanks for the extra dosh"?
Well then pass a bill with cross party support. Any party deemed to have broken the committment to tell this truth is struck off by the electoral commission as a party. It is not rocket science
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Whilst true (and what I've been saying for some months now), I need to point out that this does not make things better it makes things worse
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
You’ve said this before, but I don’t see where your figures come from. Can you give citations to ONS figures?
Which figures?
Borrowing - HoC Library via Google:
This borrowing is known as 'public sector net borrowing' but is often referred to as the deficit. In the financial year 2022/23, government revenue – from taxes and other receipts – was £1,017 billion while government spending was £1,155 billion. The deficit was therefore £137 billion, equivalent to 5.4% of GDP
Households in UK:
There were an estimated 28.2 million households in the UK in 2022; 6.1% or 1.6 million more households than there were in 2012 (26.6 million households). The average household size remained similar over the last 10 years, with 2.36 residents per household in both 2012 and in 2022.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
Trouble is that positive action will cost. From today's Times;
Sources in the department pointed the finger at Rishi Sunak for slashing the school repairs budget, with cash allocated for 50 school replacements a year at his 2021 spending, down from 100 previously and far less than the 300 requested by officials. “This has been one of the most high-profile things in the department for years,” one insider said. “RAAC is only one of a number of reasons why there is a risk of children dying in schools.”
Back in the day, @Leon speculated that COVID was able to sense and exploit human hubris. Colourful, but he had a point. Natural phenomena will cause disaster if we're not alert to risks. In this case, the logic for decades has been
1 The design life for this is X years 2 But everyone knows that engineers pad design lives, because they're cautious 3 And hardly anything bad has happened left 4 So we don't need to spend money on it yet
Which works fine until it doesn't.
Natural and engineering phenomena are bracingly moral in a way that politics and finance aren't.
I have a speculation that the more control humanity exerts over natural things, the more out of control other natural things become.
And that's totally fine, loads of people are not into gaming. I go in and out of interest, but it's somthing I have done since I was young, like reading, so it's part of my default consideration about what to do.
But even if people are not into gaming in the slightest, it's the bemusement that others are which is strange - and it is usually expressed as a thing expected to grow out of, which goes beyond personal disinterest. Some people might dare to question interest in political minutiae as a hobby too, but it's not odd (well, not exactly).
I will say being into gaming can be useful for those with children and teenagers though, precisely because young people may be more into it, and the older person still has the muscle memory, and its an activity even a bored youngster might get on board with. My brother doesn't live with his daughter, who is now into her teens, and one of the things they have kept up for years is playing games together online. Years and years of Minecraft (a 'game' which would bore me to tears) on a weekly basis for example, chatting away for hours at a time. He didn't say so directly but it was obvious he was a bit upset when his TV broke and he didn't have another way of playing with her for 8 weeks until he could afford a replacement. Even though they did see each other and do other things, it was a genuine shared interest for both of them, not parental duty or child obligation.
Agreed. Computer games vary almost as much as books or movies, so it's hard to generalise, but solo gaming fills in the cracks if you have periods on your own and want to fill X minutes/hours with no fuss whatever, while multi-player games with friends is simply an easy way to enjoy something together even if you're far apart physically, typically chatting while you play. The AI isn't usually ChatGPT-level amazing, but it's good enough to supply competent opponents to fill any slots you want if you've got a six-player game with 3 friends. The basic appeal is that the game is an intellectual and/or dexterity challenge that you can be sure to rise to if you practice - which is satisfying for most temperaments.
This is just one of several reasons you are one of the coolest ex-MPs out there
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
Two reasons.
Main one is Prisoner's Dilemma. The temptation to make a deal like that and then he the first one to break it, leaving the other lot holding the poonami'd baby, would be too big to ignore.
The other one is that it would only take one external populist to bring that down. "LABCON are just the same as each other, telling you lies to keep you poor..." Don't think that can be done? Ask Nigel Farage.
It's an unfortunate bit of Hunan nature, but something about Britain and our system magnifies it. Did anyone ask Nigel Lawson if his tax cuts were sustainable? Or did we all say "thanks for the extra dosh"?
Well then pass a bill with cross party support. Any party deemed to have broken the committment to tell this truth is struck off by the electoral commission as a party. It is not rocket science
Even if you think that's desirable, it doesn't deal with the New Party Telling You The Truth THEY Want To Hide problem.
Besides, it's relatively easy to make the budget balance in one year. All you do is extend the replacement cycles for buildings and infrastructure and not spend on new equipment. See 2010. In the immediate term, that causes no problems whatsoever.
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
I understand, though do not really agree with, national leaders apologising for some historic sins committed by past governments, at least if they are beyond living memory.
But individuals and families apologising for things like this just seems like a total waste of time and usually nothing more than self indulgent attention grabbing through faux empathy, as I do not believe people are feeling deep personal guilt over the fact an ancestor centuries ago did horrible stuff, they are just prostrating themselves in some ritual behaviour to gain some weird social credit. In this case it's not that, but because she was reported to have tried to 'hide' it, and so is presumably trying to shortcut further criticism, as bondegezou alludes to.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Sir Kid Starver and Austerity Reeves will have a Manifesto outflanking the BoJo Tories to the right
Brits want great public services but unless you raise taxes that’s not going to happen. This becomes a political football so services suffer because there’s a lack of any honesty with the public about what’s needed .
And because politics is a win at any cost exercise now more than ever there is advantage in telling people what they want to hear.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
Two reasons.
Main one is Prisoner's Dilemma. The temptation to make a deal like that and then he the first one to break it, leaving the other lot holding the poonami'd baby, would be too big to ignore.
The other one is that it would only take one external populist to bring that down. "LABCON are just the same as each other, telling you lies to keep you poor..." Don't think that can be done? Ask Nigel Farage.
It's an unfortunate bit of Hunan nature, but something about Britain and our system magnifies it. Did anyone ask Nigel Lawson if his tax cuts were sustainable? Or did we all say "thanks for the extra dosh"?
Well then pass a bill with cross party support. Any party deemed to have broken the committment to tell this truth is struck off by the electoral commission as a party. It is not rocket science
Even if you think that's desirable, it doesn't deal with the New Party Telling You The Truth THEY Want To Hide problem.
Besides, it's relatively easy to make the budget balance in one year. All you do is extend the replacement cycles for buildings and infrastructure and not spend on new equipment. See 2010. In the immediate term, that causes no problems whatsoever.
I think you missed my point. It has nothing to do with budget balances whatsoever. I am just saying that they have to stop telling voters you can have low taxes and all the good public services you want. How they budget when in power doesn't come into it. Once politicians tell this simple truth labour will be able to talk about tax rises to fund better services and tories can talk about tax cuts and reducing the level of services and people get an honest choice. Currently we have all parties telling us we can have low tax and good service and they are all lying
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
An interesting list and I thank you for posting it. Your point about processes offered by the NHS. I know that some people consider this as why is the NHS wasting money offering gender reassignment treatment. I take your point as why is the NHS burning billions and billions running vast administrative contracts to buy in facilities and treatments from the other bits of the NHS.
What we spend as front line provision isn't the issue. Schools aren't broken because of woke teachers wasting money on inappropriate school trips. Services are broken because of all the money syphoned away from front line provision into administration, contract management, legal fees etc etc etc. Instead of spending education money building new schools to replace dangerous crumbling ones, the money was given to build free schools where the budget didn't matter, nor did the ocean of cash being hoovered into the pockets of the people running them and the other trusts.
So I'm not sure that we can adequately calculate how much we need to properly fund things when so much cash is basically being pocketed by a spiv class who are in it for themselves.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
The problem with this theory (which is not wholly without foundation, at least in the sense he changed the Tory offer due to how well Corbyn did in 2017), is that one of the things that Corbynites often complain about online is that the 'right' or 'establishment' hated Corbyn so much and took him down with lies because they feared his policies.
And yet apparently they don't, according to you, since people liked it so much they voted to have them by supporting Boris Johnson! And despite your claim that Keir has gone even further to the right than the present government, another more common claim is that he would simply make no difference from the present government - meaning by your logic Keir would be promoting many of Corbyn's policies.
Corbyn had great appeal with some groups, but had too much baggage for the bulk of the country. Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
Good morning everybody! When I awoke it was bright and sunny. Now all the doings of the early morning are completed it’s grey and cloudy. Our local secondary school is one of those hit hard by the RAAC problem. There’s talk of closing the Village Hall to accommodate some classes.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Sir Kid Starver and Austerity Reeves will have a Manifesto outflanking the BoJo Tories to the right
All hale Sir Kid Starver
So the most left wing choice is to vote Tory. Glad you clarified that for us.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
An interesting list and I thank you for posting it. Your point about processes offered by the NHS. I know that some people consider this as why is the NHS wasting money offering gender reassignment treatment. I take your point as why is the NHS burning billions and billions running vast administrative contracts to buy in facilities and treatments from the other bits of the NHS.
What we spend as front line provision isn't the issue. Schools aren't broken because of woke teachers wasting money on inappropriate school trips. Services are broken because of all the money syphoned away from front line provision into administration, contract management, legal fees etc etc etc. Instead of spending education money building new schools to replace dangerous crumbling ones, the money was given to build free schools where the budget didn't matter, nor did the ocean of cash being hoovered into the pockets of the people running them and the other trusts.
So I'm not sure that we can adequately calculate how much we need to properly fund things when so much cash is basically being pocketed by a spiv class who are in it for themselves.
I made no particular pronouncements on what things should be cut, but we should look closely at every area. I can give you an example from the NHS of wasting money. A company I worked for made a phone app which could replace a hospital pager system. It was designed to be always on and the idea was hospital could get cheap androids hand them out at start of shift. Hand them back in at close of shift so not on your personal phone. Several trusts asked us to make an IOS version. What the hell why use expensive iphones when it runs perfectly on a 20£ android?
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Sir Kid Starver and Austerity Reeves will have a Manifesto outflanking the BoJo Tories to the right
All hale Sir Kid Starver
As a Labour supporter I’m deeply disappointed with Starmer and Reeves obsession with avoiding Tory attacks , they’ve become far too timid and I think this is a mistake .
However the choice is another 5 years of the Tories or Labour. Your socialist purity test is fine with a different voting system but all you’re doing is enabling the Tories .
Would you still feel this way if the Tories manifesto included a withdrawal from the ECHR ? What do they have to do for you to hold your nose and vote Labour ?
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
You’ve said this before, but I don’t see where your figures come from. Can you give citations to ONS figures?
Which figures?
Borrowing - HoC Library via Google:
This borrowing is known as 'public sector net borrowing' but is often referred to as the deficit. In the financial year 2022/23, government revenue – from taxes and other receipts – was £1,017 billion while government spending was £1,155 billion. The deficit was therefore £137 billion, equivalent to 5.4% of GDP
Households in UK:
There were an estimated 28.2 million households in the UK in 2022; 6.1% or 1.6 million more households than there were in 2012 (26.6 million households). The average household size remained similar over the last 10 years, with 2.36 residents per household in both 2012 and in 2022.
So, the deficit goes up and down. It is higher now in part because of COVID-19 and energy costs spiralling because of the war in Ukraine. One might also suggest that it is high now because of Conservative incompetence (e.g. save a small amount on not employing enough Home Office staff, end up paying a large amount on asylum seekers awaiting decisions).
Also, the country has run deficits for most of the last several decades. You can run a deficit if the economy is growing, so debt still falls as a proportion of GDP. So, you can’t take £100B per annum or £137B per annum and declare that we have to immediately raise that much more tax. Yes, it is a relevant figure, but it’s not “you have to raise tax to deal with this in one year”. You can grow the economy, you can cut the deficit over time.
You then give figures per “million tax payers/households”, but tax payers are not the same as households. Those are figures per household. A household may have more than one taxpayer. By taking a figure per household, you get a scarier figure than one per taxpayer. Also, you effectively ignore corporation taxes by presuming personal taxes have to cover the increase alone.
So, yes, there is a deficit and current interest on borrowing is high. However, you overegg the argument to get a more dramatic figure than is correct.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later we are fast approaching the point where irresistible force meets immovable object. Frankly I think we are nearing a post democratic age in any case because democracy isn't providing any useful answers. So yes you might call it bollocks but it is what is needed to be done
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
That last stage doesn’t make any sense. You can’t make an ordered list. Let’s say one item on your list is pay pensions, but the cost of paying pensions depends on what level you set them at. It’s mad to say you won’t fund something lower on the list at all having decided to fund something higher on the list when you can tweak the thing higher on the list to be a bit cheaper (or a bit more expensive).
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
In our current culture there is no belief in politics that you can be elected to government by telling the truth about tax/spend etc, and there hasn't been certainly since 1992 when Major won (in part) by attacking Labour tax plans.
Until this changes, and the 'low tax high spend' stuff is starting to run out of road, maybe it should be the task of smaller parties to make it their useful USP that they do their maths in public and tell it how it is. Like telling us how much the NHS would cost to run properly and so on, and what effect it would have on tax.
Democracy's reliance on ignorance is a grave weakness.
So I wake up to news that Mason Greenwood has been signed by Getafe on a loan deal where Manchester United continue to pay his wages.
So the carefully-worded statement saying that all sides agree that he should rebuild his career away from Old Trafford was just more smoke-blowing. We haven't dispensed with his services at all. Its just pathetic management.
While I understand your comments I suspect employment law is playing ( excuse the pun) a part in this as his contract is to 2025
Why? Bringing the club into disrepute. Gross Misconduct. Contract terminated.
Fair comment but I am sure the lawyers are all over it
By the way if I had my way his contract would have been terminated and told he has no future with the club
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
That last stage doesn’t make any sense. You can’t make an ordered list. Let’s say one item on your list is pay pensions, but the cost of paying pensions depends on what level you set them at. It’s mad to say you won’t fund something lower on the list at all having decided to fund something higher on the list when you can tweak the thing higher on the list to be a bit cheaper (or a bit more expensive).
You do those calculations as part of stage 2 which is looking at everything coming under the headline and deciding bits to drop and tweak.
My turn to ask then as I put up when challenged I expect you to do the same.
If the state continues to do all it does now and full funds it how many extra billion do you think the state needs to take from people?
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later we are fast approaching the point where irresistible force meets immovable object. Frankly I think we are nearing a post democratic age in any case because democracy isn't providing any useful answers. So yes you might call it bollocks but it is what is needed to be done
We have a party in power who’s getting it wrong, but they’ll be kicked out at the next election and a different party will try different things. That’s democracy working.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Would be difficult with Mr Starmer if he keeps his promises to freeze to so many current tax levels.
Didn't the old chuff-fart rule out a wealth tax in any form?
I see a 'turns out the problems are even worse than we thought because of Tory incompetence, sadly we must u turn' moment coming.
I hope so. Starmer is in serious danger of promising too little.
The concern I have is that he’s boxing himself in so that his government is going to be continuity Sunak, which nobody really wants.
I will however wait until the manifesto to form a concrete view. He is clearly taking the “say nothing that could be construed in any way controversial” approach to the pre-GE phoney war.
Yes, I like to think that his approach is to systematically rule out one form of spending after another, to minimise the attack lines and give serious credibility to the few promises that will actually be made at election time.
ULEZ is an interesting example of the dangers of going with the opinion polls to announce an apparently popular policy. Most people are vaguely in favour - cleaner air, what's not to like? - but the minority affected and the larger number who think they might be affected are passinately against. If you annouynce a policy early, it gives the media time to erode support for it.
I do of course worry that in reality he really doesn't plan to do anything! But I think that's unlikely.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later we are fast approaching the point where irresistible force meets immovable object. Frankly I think we are nearing a post democratic age in any case because democracy isn't providing any useful answers. So yes you might call it bollocks but it is what is needed to be done
We have a party in power who’s getting it wrong, but they’ll be kicked out at the next election and a different party will try different things. That’s democracy working.
Really you believe starmers labour is going to make any difference? To give you a clue they are not things will continue to get worse under them and not because I dislike labour that I am saying that, they have no answers that give me any hope of improvement that I have seen. They and the tories have been following pretty much the same paths for the last 50 years with mere tweaks. It is the last 50 years that have brought us here so why you imagine more of the same will help...its like believing in unicorns
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later we are fast approaching the point where irresistible force meets immovable object. Frankly I think we are nearing a post democratic age in any case because democracy isn't providing any useful answers. So yes you might call it bollocks but it is what is needed to be done
We have a party in power who’s getting it wrong, but they’ll be kicked out at the next election and a different party will try different things. That’s democracy working.
Only if they do try different things, as opposed to doing the same things differently.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
That last stage doesn’t make any sense. You can’t make an ordered list. Let’s say one item on your list is pay pensions, but the cost of paying pensions depends on what level you set them at. It’s mad to say you won’t fund something lower on the list at all having decided to fund something higher on the list when you can tweak the thing higher on the list to be a bit cheaper (or a bit more expensive).
You do those calculations as part of stage 2 which is looking at everything coming under the headline and deciding bits to drop and tweak.
My turn to ask then as I put up when challenged I expect you to do the same.
If the state continues to do all it does now and full funds it how many extra billion do you think the state needs to take from people?
Great. We can now tweak in stage 2. But we can also tweak in stage 1, with taxes and different sorts of taxes. And by the time we’ve done all that tweaking… well, what you’re describing is what happens. Countries routinely vary taxation and vary spending.
I believe the state can do what it does now better. Instead of the false economy of cutting costs leading to worse public services that then leads to a less productive population, I believe we can save money in the long term by investing in public services. Invest so you have a healthier population, invest so the courts work, invest so the immigration system works, invest so you have a more educated population, invest in innovation. I also believe in higher taxes to pay for better public services, not just to make us more productive, but so we have nicer lives. Plenty of our European neighbours have higher taxation than us. We’re not near some mythical maximum possible tax take.
These narratives of doom and decline end up just excusing government incompetence. We can do things better.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later
Why? I am sure some three monitor wanker will know more but countries run massive debt-fuelled deficits for decades. They just periodically have periods of high inflation and occasionally default.
Without the discipline of being in the Euro there is no reason to suppose that the UK can't go down that crooked path.
Lovely warm early autumn weather here in the Maconnais where we’re at the place for some building site meetings, notary palavas and a silver wedding anniversary weekend at Chateau de Bagnols just south in Beaujolais.
29C today. 31C tomorrow. And it’s on its way North to Blighty by Sunday.
8th warmest summer on record for the UK. 33rd warmest for central England in a series going back more than 350 years. Not bad, even though it felt so. We forget just how shit the long term average British weather is.
It has no dog in the foreground and therefore I cannot estimate scale.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later we are fast approaching the point where irresistible force meets immovable object. Frankly I think we are nearing a post democratic age in any case because democracy isn't providing any useful answers. So yes you might call it bollocks but it is what is needed to be done
We have a party in power who’s getting it wrong, but they’ll be kicked out at the next election and a different party will try different things. That’s democracy working.
Really you believe starmers labour is going to make any difference? To give you a clue they are not things will continue to get worse under them and not because I dislike labour that I am saying that, they have no answers that give me any hope of improvement that I have seen. They and the tories have been following pretty much the same paths for the last 50 years with mere tweaks. It is the last 50 years that have brought us here so why you imagine more of the same will help...its like believing in unicorns
“They’re all the same”, you suggest, but this is nonsense. I’m not saying New Labour were perfect, by any means, but things were better 1997-2010 than 2015-now.
On a more positive note, a great night out last night to see Wishbone Ash at the Flowerpot in Derby.
I have long been a fan, and saw them 4 decades ago at Southampton Gaumont, they still are great live and played the entire 1973 Live Dates set. Great for old rockers, though both band and audience noticeably less hirsute than when they first appeared with their classic twin guitar rock.
Good real ales at £4 a pint too!
I've only been to the Flowerpot once, years ago. We were sat in the bar having a pint while Midge Ure was playing in the other room.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later we are fast approaching the point where irresistible force meets immovable object. Frankly I think we are nearing a post democratic age in any case because democracy isn't providing any useful answers. So yes you might call it bollocks but it is what is needed to be done
We have a party in power who’s getting it wrong, but they’ll be kicked out at the next election and a different party will try different things. That’s democracy working.
Only if they do try different things, as opposed to doing the same things differently.
That’s gobbledegook.
Of course a Labour government will be different. I’m not claiming Starmer will be fantastic — I’m in his constituency and I didn’t vote for him last election — but he’ll be different from the current administration.
On a more positive note, a great night out last night to see Wishbone Ash at the Flowerpot in Derby.
I have long been a fan, and saw them 4 decades ago at Southampton Gaumont, they still are great live and played the entire 1973 Live Dates set. Great for old rockers, though both band and audience noticeably less hirsute than when they first appeared with their classic twin guitar rock.
Good real ales at £4 a pint too!
I've only been to the Flowerpot once, years ago. We were sat in the bar having a pint while Midge Ure was playing in the other room.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Would be difficult with Mr Starmer if he keeps his promises to freeze to so many current tax levels.
Didn't the old chuff-fart rule out a wealth tax in any form?
I see a 'turns out the problems are even worse than we thought because of Tory incompetence, sadly we must u turn' moment coming.
I hope so. Starmer is in serious danger of promising too little.
The concern I have is that he’s boxing himself in so that his government is going to be continuity Sunak, which nobody really wants.
I will however wait until the manifesto to form a concrete view. He is clearly taking the “say nothing that could be construed in any way controversial” approach to the pre-GE phoney war.
Yes, I like to think that his approach is to systematically rule out one form of spending after another, to minimise the attack lines and give serious credibility to the few promises that will actually be made at election time.
ULEZ is an interesting example of the dangers of going with the opinion polls to announce an apparently popular policy. Most people are vaguely in favour - cleaner air, what's not to like? - but the minority affected and the larger number who think they might be affected are passinately against. If you annouynce a policy early, it gives the media time to erode support for it.
I do of course worry that in reality he really doesn't plan to do anything! But I think that's unlikely.
Indeed, Nick Ferrari has been on ULEZ almost every weekday for over a year. The Tories didn't even have a handle on it until the Uxbridge campaign, and when it gave them a surprise (marginal) win, rowing back on green or public health related issues is their new USP. The whole of the Tory media are now behind them, and ULEZ expansion is the poster boy for all that is wrong with a Labour "nanny state", despite expansion being by edict from Shapps/Fox/Green.
Khan's messaging was and remains poor, but Conservative re-editing of the ULEZ narrative is quite remarkable.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
And the main reason SKS was elected Lab leader, the other one being uniting the Membership
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
Trouble is that positive action will cost. From today's Times;
Sources in the department pointed the finger at Rishi Sunak for slashing the school repairs budget, with cash allocated for 50 school replacements a year at his 2021 spending, down from 100 previously and far less than the 300 requested by officials. “This has been one of the most high-profile things in the department for years,” one insider said. “RAAC is only one of a number of reasons why there is a risk of children dying in schools.”
Back in the day, @Leon speculated that COVID was able to sense and exploit human hubris. Colourful, but he had a point. Natural phenomena will cause disaster if we're not alert to risks. In this case, the logic for decades has been
1 The design life for this is X years 2 But everyone knows that engineers pad design lives, because they're cautious 3 And hardly anything bad has happened left 4 So we don't need to spend money on it yet
Which works fine until it doesn't.
Natural and engineering phenomena are bracingly moral in a way that politics and finance aren't.
The other problem of course is that Covid has sucked budgets dry, and then the unfunded pay rise has put every school in the land into deficit.
They literally do not have the money to do anything about this.
And because of the academy structure the Local Authorities can't help them.
So any extra funds will have to come from central government, which is also going through a Robert Maxwell phase of bouncing Czechs.
The logic which Stuartinromford outlines (not his own!) is also defective in that there are all sorts of other reasons to replace/rebuild schools anyway, and if there are x schools with a design life of y then the replacement rate in a steady state should be something like x/y pa assuming a steady state, which this won't be - it will be lumpy, making it worse sometimes. But if some C of the E who coincidentalluy likes helicopter rides has cut that to a small fraction then it will all pile up (pun most certainly not intended) and get even worse.
Oversimplifying massively (I'm a physicist, it's what we're trained to be good at)...
There are about 30000 state schools in the UK.
If you replace 300 a year, that's a replacement cycle of 100 years. Whilst it's certainly possible to build something that lasts 100 years, it requires a different attitude to the one the British state has taken postwar.
Besides, the then CofE decided that we couldn't afford to replace 300 schools a year. At fifty schools a year, you're talking a 600 year replacement cycle, which gets you back to the 1400s.
Coincidentally, Winchester College was founded in 1382.
To sum up, the UK has been hiding all sorts of bills under the doormat for decades, even as they've turned from blue to red. Now the bailiffs appear to be knocking on the door.
Indeed: the Fermi piano tuner analysis is a very useful tool.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later
Why? I am sure some three monitor wanker will know more but countries run massive debt-fuelled deficits for decades. They just periodically have periods of high inflation and occasionally default.
Without the discipline of being in the Euro there is no reason to suppose that the UK can't go down that crooked path.
Because we are running massive deficits and debt repayment is taking ever bigger chunks of tax revenues. We are basically already borrowing to repay debt. The uk defaulting would be catastrophic and would basically end our ability to borrow in one fell swoop and then what happens to all that funding for state services answer is we have to cut back on them. Which is what we should do before we are forced too by necessity.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
The scale of tax raising needed is indicated by the £100 bn per annum current borrowing. To cover this (and to do that repairs no more schools, just stops the increasing debt) is £3,300 per year for 30 million tax payers/households. If you confine it to the wealthy, that is £10,000 per year extra for 10 million tax payers/households (the top third) or £20,000 per year for the top 5 million tax payers/households.
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
That however only covers the deficit. What about all the extra money that people keep saying is needed to be poured into justice, refugee processing,policing,education,health care, social care etc. I suspect you can double those figures.
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
Out of interest, what do you think is needed? I am one of the people who says money needs to be spent on those things, and thats because none of those critical services are currently functional.
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
I think we need to do three things
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
That last stage doesn’t make any sense. You can’t make an ordered list. Let’s say one item on your list is pay pensions, but the cost of paying pensions depends on what level you set them at. It’s mad to say you won’t fund something lower on the list at all having decided to fund something higher on the list when you can tweak the thing higher on the list to be a bit cheaper (or a bit more expensive).
You do those calculations as part of stage 2 which is looking at everything coming under the headline and deciding bits to drop and tweak.
My turn to ask then as I put up when challenged I expect you to do the same.
If the state continues to do all it does now and full funds it how many extra billion do you think the state needs to take from people?
Great. We can now tweak in stage 2. But we can also tweak in stage 1, with taxes and different sorts of taxes. And by the time we’ve done all that tweaking… well, what you’re describing is what happens. Countries routinely vary taxation and vary spending.
I believe the state can do what it does now better. Instead of the false economy of cutting costs leading to worse public services that then leads to a less productive population, I believe we can save money in the long term by investing in public services. Invest so you have a healthier population, invest so the courts work, invest so the immigration system works, invest so you have a more educated population, invest in innovation. I also believe in higher taxes to pay for better public services, not just to make us more productive, but so we have nicer lives. Plenty of our European neighbours have higher taxation than us. We’re not near some mythical maximum possible tax take.
These narratives of doom and decline end up just excusing government incompetence. We can do things better.
There is a fairly simple technique demonstrated in a well performing health system to:
"lower use of OOH (Out of Hours) services, fewer acute hospital admissions, and lower mortality. The presence of a dose–response relationship between continuity and these outcomes indicates that the associations are causal."
Similtaneously it also improves both patient satisfaction and job satisfaction of staff.
Poor productivity in the NHS is both a major problem clinically and financially, and also very fixable, with a quick turnaround in terms of cost savings and outcomes.
I am sure the same is true in both secondary and tertiary care too.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
And the main reason SKS was elected Lab leader, the other one being uniting the Membership
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
And the main reason SKS was elected Lab leader, the other one being uniting the Membership
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
I am not a surveyor or know much about the practise however millions does seem somewhat excessive
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Would be difficult with Mr Starmer if he keeps his promises to freeze to so many current tax levels.
Didn't the old chuff-fart rule out a wealth tax in any form?
I see a 'turns out the problems are even worse than we thought because of Tory incompetence, sadly we must u turn' moment coming.
I hope so. Starmer is in serious danger of promising too little.
The concern I have is that he’s boxing himself in so that his government is going to be continuity Sunak, which nobody really wants.
I will however wait until the manifesto to form a concrete view. He is clearly taking the “say nothing that could be construed in any way controversial” approach to the pre-GE phoney war.
Yes, I like to think that his approach is to systematically rule out one form of spending after another, to minimise the attack lines and give serious credibility to the few promises that will actually be made at election time.
ULEZ is an interesting example of the dangers of going with the opinion polls to announce an apparently popular policy. Most people are vaguely in favour - cleaner air, what's not to like? - but the minority affected and the larger number who think they might be affected are passinately against. If you annouynce a policy early, it gives the media time to erode support for it.
I do of course worry that in reality he really doesn't plan to do anything! But I think that's unlikely.
Indeed, Nick Ferrari has been on ULEZ almost every weekday for over a year. The Tories didn't even have a handle on it until the Uxbridge campaign, and when it gave them a surprise (marginal) win, rowing back on green or public health related issues is their new USP. The whole of the Tory media are now behind them, and ULEZ expansion is the poster boy for all that is wrong with a Labour "nanny state", despite expansion being by edict from Shapps/Fox/Green.
Khan's messaging was and remains poor, but Conservative re-editing of the ULEZ narrative is quite remarkable.
There’s a post on our local Facebook page with a picture of someone riding a camel and the title of ‘Khan’s vision of London’. We’re 40 miles from London.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
And the main reason SKS was elected Lab leader, the other one being uniting the Membership
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
So I wake up to news that Mason Greenwood has been signed by Getafe on a loan deal where Manchester United continue to pay his wages.
So the carefully-worded statement saying that all sides agree that he should rebuild his career away from Old Trafford was just more smoke-blowing. We haven't dispensed with his services at all. Its just pathetic management.
While I understand your comments I suspect employment law is playing (excuse the pun) a part in this as his contract is to 2025
Although they could have just left him on the sidelines until he asked to be released from his contract.
Yes but I assume they would still be paying him until the end of it so not sure why he would want to be released from it
I’m sure Greenwood will be quite at home under the Spanish FA.
Anyway, breaking news, Manchester Utd signed TWO STRIKERS seconds before the 11 o’clock deadline.
A junior doctor from Chelsea. And a train driver from York. 😄
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
Isn't the problem with RAAC that it is impossible to predict structural failure by external survey?
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Would be difficult with Mr Starmer if he keeps his promises to freeze to so many current tax levels.
Didn't the old chuff-fart rule out a wealth tax in any form?
I see a 'turns out the problems are even worse than we thought because of Tory incompetence, sadly we must u turn' moment coming.
I hope so. Starmer is in serious danger of promising too little.
The concern I have is that he’s boxing himself in so that his government is going to be continuity Sunak, which nobody really wants.
I will however wait until the manifesto to form a concrete view. He is clearly taking the “say nothing that could be construed in any way controversial” approach to the pre-GE phoney war.
Yes, I like to think that his approach is to systematically rule out one form of spending after another, to minimise the attack lines and give serious credibility to the few promises that will actually be made at election time.
ULEZ is an interesting example of the dangers of going with the opinion polls to announce an apparently popular policy. Most people are vaguely in favour - cleaner air, what's not to like? - but the minority affected and the larger number who think they might be affected are passinately against. If you annouynce a policy early, it gives the media time to erode support for it.
I do of course worry that in reality he really doesn't plan to do anything! But I think that's unlikely.
Indeed, Nick Ferrari has been on ULEZ almost every weekday for over a year. The Tories didn't even have a handle on it until the Uxbridge campaign, and when it gave them a surprise (marginal) win, rowing back on green or public health related issues is their new USP. The whole of the Tory media are now behind them, and ULEZ expansion is the poster boy for all that is wrong with a Labour "nanny state", despite expansion being by edict from Shapps/Fox/Green.
Khan's messaging was and remains poor, but Conservative re-editing of the ULEZ narrative is quite remarkable.
There’s a post on our local Facebook page with a picture of someone riding a camel and the title of ‘Khan’s vision of London’. We’re 40 miles from London.
Is there a hint of racism in such a notion? I suspect there probably is.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
And the main reason SKS was elected Lab leader, the other one being uniting the Membership
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
What is the point of a non-compromising party of opposition that clings to its ideology and remains in perpetual opposition?
What is the point of a Party seeking to get into Government having exactly the same Policies as the last Party of Government and throwing every principle down the pan?
In order to enrich yourself?
The country is crying out for change neither of the 2 main Parties offer any at all
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
We get the politicians we deserve. If we wanted good governance, we’d vote for it.
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
I cant see the next one doing anything positive either
Would be difficult with Mr Starmer if he keeps his promises to freeze to so many current tax levels.
Didn't the old chuff-fart rule out a wealth tax in any form?
I see a 'turns out the problems are even worse than we thought because of Tory incompetence, sadly we must u turn' moment coming.
I hope so. Starmer is in serious danger of promising too little.
The concern I have is that he’s boxing himself in so that his government is going to be continuity Sunak, which nobody really wants.
I will however wait until the manifesto to form a concrete view. He is clearly taking the “say nothing that could be construed in any way controversial” approach to the pre-GE phoney war.
Yes, I like to think that his approach is to systematically rule out one form of spending after another, to minimise the attack lines and give serious credibility to the few promises that will actually be made at election time.
ULEZ is an interesting example of the dangers of going with the opinion polls to announce an apparently popular policy. Most people are vaguely in favour - cleaner air, what's not to like? - but the minority affected and the larger number who think they might be affected are passinately against. If you annouynce a policy early, it gives the media time to erode support for it.
I do of course worry that in reality he really doesn't plan to do anything! But I think that's unlikely.
Indeed, Nick Ferrari has been on ULEZ almost every weekday for over a year. The Tories didn't even have a handle on it until the Uxbridge campaign, and when it gave them a surprise (marginal) win, rowing back on green or public health related issues is their new USP. The whole of the Tory media are now behind them, and ULEZ expansion is the poster boy for all that is wrong with a Labour "nanny state", despite expansion being by edict from Shapps/Fox/Green.
Khan's messaging was and remains poor, but Conservative re-editing of the ULEZ narrative is quite remarkable.
There’s a post on our local Facebook page with a picture of someone riding a camel and the title of ‘Khan’s vision of London’. We’re 40 miles from London.
Is there a hint of racism in such a notion? I suspect there probably is.
My wife and I were saying at breakfast that this RAAC scandal typifies the UK's approach to economic development and that it was the same in the 60s and 70s so nothing has changed. Everything is built or made to solve today's problems and fuck the future. Those buildings were made with substandard concrete because the governments of the day didn't want to spend the money on proper concrete and now it's going to cost us 10x as much as today to solve this and replace all of the RAAC in buildings.
We do this in all walks of life too, the UK has got no economic resilience because we never want to spend the 10% extra at the right moments or we cut costs to point where everything behind the curtain is a shit fest.
Today everything is being cut to the bone and our economic resilience is basically zero because the government has decided to prioritise old age spending to buy votes. Back then the same generation who is benefiting from today's largesse decided to cut investment knowing that long term consequences for future generations would be dire.
The baby boomer generation is quite possibly the single most selfish to ever have existed, I hope the next Labour government has got the cojones to tax the fuck out of them, tax the fuck out of inheritance and properly tax high fixed incomes and rent seeking at a significantly higher rate than income. I have very little faith.
As an aside, a theory I've heard about the plague of Justinian's reign is that the rats/fleas that transmitted the bubonic pestilence were normally isolated near the mouth of the Nile. A volcanic eruption or meteor strike caused the climate to cool globally for years, enabling said vermin to travel north to Egypt, and then the rest of the Empire.
Interesting to consider the unexpected ways that climate/weather can affect things.
Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis is all about the effects of climate change on politics in the Seventeenth Century, and is excellent.
If I had to choose the worst time to be alive, it would be the 17th century.
The growth of the centralised State placed far more power into the hands of governments to raise vast armies and deliver lethal violence. The restraints that the Catholic Church had imposed upon warfare in medieval times had disappeared. And all sides now believed God was on their side.
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
Isn't the problem with RAAC that it is impossible to predict structural failure by external survey?
Yes, it needs to be replaced, I read on Friday the national bill for this could end up being £30-40bn just for publicly owned buildings.
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Surely as Starmer is absolutely a Tory according to your lot this is wrong? Because a Starmer win is a Tory win?
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
BoJo 2019 manifesto was pulled leftwards and many of Jezzas policies have been implemented
Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
And the main reason SKS was elected Lab leader, the other one being uniting the Membership
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
What is the point of a non-compromising party of opposition that clings to its ideology and remains in perpetual opposition?
What is the point of a Party seeking to get into Government having exactly the same Policies as the last Party of Government and throwing every principle down the pan?
In order to enrich yourself?
The country is crying out for change neither of the 2 main Parties offer any at all
If only we would elect Corbyn, everything would be rosy, the future perfect, unicorns would breed more and we might even get sunnily lit uplands....
Our @itvnews investigation into RAAC in schools back in MARCH was alarming, and parents were understandably worried.
They were right to be. Many will be asking why the DfE waited until now, and days before the start of a new term, to announce schools with it should close?
It seems the answer was (as I guessed yesterday) that there was a sudden collapse somewhere. But you don't have to be a raging cynic (even though I am) to say that failing to anticipate the structural collapse of a material 20 years past its life expiry date at a time of inadequate maintenance before a mad panic at the last minute is still a pathetic performance which demonstrates the utter unfitness of the entire DfE.
The country is literally falling to bits. I cannot see this government doing anything positive about it.
There's been a lot of talk on here over the years about the country living beyond its means, borrowing from future generations etc. etc. It's clearly true but the question is what are we going to do about it?
There are surely only three levers available: cut public spending, raise taxes, grow the economy; we can do any or all of these in combination. Obviously the third lever is attractive but it's not obvious how government can engineer or even influence real growth.
Some people are going to be worse off when either of the first two levers are used but since we've been living beyond our means we just need to face up to the idea of being worse off.
Cutting public services is often a false economy, as the current RAAC crisis in schools shows. I would also contend that cutting public services has a more detrimental effect on growth than raising taxes.
Ergo: taxes will have to rise for those with above average incomes and wealth. TINA.
Good morning
A fair assessment of where we are and frankly I do not see a way through without all three of cutting spending, raising taxes on the wealthy and encourage growth
None of this is palatable to any politician and it cannot be wished away
I don't think you can just blame politicians for that, though.
Voters have come to take something for nothing as their due, and get very cross when told that taxes might go up or spending might be cut.
Not saying that it's unique to the UK, but I suspect we're more prone to it. Maybe FPTP makes it too costly to be the first one to submit to the realities of arithmetic.
We absolutely can blame politicians for it. It is them that have collaborated to tell the voters they can have low taxes and good services instead of telling the truth. Now they will tell you "oh but we couldnt get voted in if we told the truth" but howabout as a novel idea the parties put their heads together and just making a commitment that they will all tell this truth. Labour can then argue for high tax better services and tories for lower tax but lower services
We get the politicians we deserve. If we wanted good governance, we’d vote for it.
That makes the assumption there is actually a party that will deliver good governance. I don't see one frankly
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
why is it fine for people to inherit wealth but blithely ignore the circumstances in which that wealth was accumulated?
She has inherited wealth? She didn't even know this guy was a relative. There is too much hand-wringing going on about sins of the past. Slavery is Bad. So the way to atone isn't to hand-wring, it is to go after modern slavers.
We have people still used as captive labour today, and we do almost nothing about it because the people doing so are rich. Do we really try to stop women being trafficked for sex work? Do we make Qatar a pariah state for enslaving foreign labourers and working some to death? No - we don't care about actual slavery. But virtue-signalling and blaming someone for something they haven't done is much easier.
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
The Conservatives were well rid of her.
I’ve discovered that some of my ancestors fought in 17th century Ireland, and I’m quite sure they acted as 17th century soldiers did. I see no reason to apologise.
As an aside, a theory I've heard about the plague of Justinian's reign is that the rats/fleas that transmitted the bubonic pestilence were normally isolated near the mouth of the Nile. A volcanic eruption or meteor strike caused the climate to cool globally for years, enabling said vermin to travel north to Egypt, and then the rest of the Empire.
Interesting to consider the unexpected ways that climate/weather can affect things.
Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis is all about the effects of climate change on politics in the Seventeenth Century, and is excellent.
If I had to choose the worst time to be alive, it would be the 17th century.
The growth of the centralised State placed far more power into the hands of governments to raise vast armies and deliver lethal violence. The restraints that the Catholic Church had imposed upon warfare in medieval times had disappeared. And all sides now believed God was on their side.
Worse than the plague-ridden 14th? And what restraints on warfare did the Catholic Church impose?
So I wake up to news that Mason Greenwood has been signed by Getafe on a loan deal where Manchester United continue to pay his wages.
So the carefully-worded statement saying that all sides agree that he should rebuild his career away from Old Trafford was just more smoke-blowing. We haven't dispensed with his services at all. Its just pathetic management.
While I understand your comments I suspect employment law is playing (excuse the pun) a part in this as his contract is to 2025
Although they could have just left him on the sidelines until he asked to be released from his contract.
Yes but I assume they would still be paying him until the end of it so not sure why he would want to be released from it
I’m sure Greenwood will be quite at home under the Spanish FA.
Anyway, breaking news, Manchester Utd signed TWO STRIKERS seconds before the 11 o’clock deadline.
A junior doctor from Chelsea. And a train driver from York. 😄
I suspect Long season ahead for Man Utd, and predict Liverpool to finish above them. The only certainty is Man Utd will finish above Everton. Truth is, the Manchester United owners have properly screwed the club in this window - the money pot emptied far too early didn’t it, and it was never enough to compete for the Man Utd type signings their peers, Bayern, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Arsenal brought in. At the last minute Man Utd couldn’t even afford £8M loan fee for Cucurella and still have enough of the Glaziers money to complete the deal for The Bat? The Bat just hanging there patiently as 4th choice partner for Casamero if everything else fail through. That midfield so far this season has been targeted and passed through. Last season Man Utd’s defence was questioned, now the midfield has joined it as an issue.
Also, the Man Utd incomings are people the manager has previously worked with. He has come from a minor club, should the club of Man Utd give him the comfort blanket of players he had previously worked with? this is Man Utd, surely they should be fishing in a different pool than just the managers former players? After the managers expensive Anthony fiasco, should he have been allowed to add such question marks of the expensive line leader at one end and exorbitantly pricey keeper?
4th place could quickly become aspirational for Man U.
Anyway, we are off to a picnic, you will have to pick the bones out of it yourself today. 🙋♀️
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later
Why? I am sure some three monitor wanker will know more but countries run massive debt-fuelled deficits for decades. They just periodically have periods of high inflation and occasionally default.
Without the discipline of being in the Euro there is no reason to suppose that the UK can't go down that crooked path.
It would help a lot if our utilities were not owned by foreigners. We just wind up exporting money abroad.
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
why is it fine for people to inherit wealth but blithely ignore the circumstances in which that wealth was accumulated?
She has inherited wealth? She didn't even know this guy was a relative. There is too much hand-wringing going on about sins of the past. Slavery is Bad. So the way to atone isn't to hand-wring, it is to go after modern slavers.
We have people still used as captive labour today, and we do almost nothing about it because the people doing so are rich. Do we really try to stop women being trafficked for sex work? Do we make Qatar a pariah state for enslaving foreign labourers and working some to death? No - we don't care about actual slavery. But virtue-signalling and blaming someone for something they haven't done is much easier.
ignorance is bliss, I guess she thought it was just completely normal her family just happened to own loads of land
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
Isn't the problem with RAAC that it is impossible to predict structural failure by external survey?
Yes, it needs to be replaced, I read on Friday the national bill for this could end up being £30-40bn just for publicly owned buildings.
Its all just so short-sighted. Build cheap and build often. We have these grand old buildings - often built at public expense - left to crumble, then we replace them with something built at the lowest cost by a contractor whose contract allows them to skim off the top. So we get shoddily built crap which manages to both cost a lot and be cheap at the same time. This then needs replacing in a few decades whilst the grand old ediface looks on.
So - radical idea - lets save money by spending money. We do not "save" money by cutting the schools budget or similar - we spend the unspent money on maintenance costs. How do we get past this mindset where any investment is seen as "cost" with "who will pay?" as the reflex question? Who pays if we *don't* spend. Its a lie that we can just cut budgets.
My wife and I were saying at breakfast that this RAAC scandal typifies the UK's approach to economic development and that it was the same in the 60s and 70s so nothing has changed. Everything is built or made to solve today's problems and fuck the future. Those buildings were made with substandard concrete because the governments of the day didn't want to spend the money on proper concrete and now it's going to cost us 10x as much as today to solve this and replace all of the RAAC in buildings.
We do this in all walks of life too, the UK has got no economic resilience because we never want to spend the 10% extra at the right moments or we cut costs to point where everything behind the curtain is a shit fest.
Today everything is being cut to the bone and our economic resilience is basically zero because the government has decided to prioritise old age spending to buy votes. Back then the same generation who is benefiting from today's largesse decided to cut investment knowing that long term consequences for future generations would be dire.
The baby boomer generation is quite possibly the single most selfish to ever have existed, I hope the next Labour government has got the cojones to tax the fuck out of them, tax the fuck out of inheritance and properly tax high fixed incomes and rent seeking at a significantly higher rate than income. I have very little faith.
Interesting question.
Is the problem with the boomer generation that they're uniquely selfish, or just that they're uniquely numerous which allows them to enact the selfishness that most people would do, given the chance?
Especially now that their parents, the ones who actually experienced wartime deprivation, have passed on and aren't there as a living reality check.
The practical effect is the same, natch, but the political problem and solution is slightly different.
As for government policy after the next election, it doesn't matter what the manifestoes say. Overall, we're going to be paying more for less.
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
The Conservatives were well rid of her.
I’ve discovered that some of my ancestors fought in 17th century Ireland, and I’m quite sure they acted as 17th century soldiers did. I see no reason to apologise.
Mrs RP has ancestors who fought in the OG IRA. Is she supposed to apologise for what great-great-grandad did a century ago? What does it have to do with her?
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
Isn't the problem with RAAC that it is impossible to predict structural failure by external survey?
Yes, it needs to be replaced, I read on Friday the national bill for this could end up being £30-40bn just for publicly owned buildings.
Its all just so short-sighted. Build cheap and build often. We have these grand old buildings - often built at public expense - left to crumble, then we replace them with something built at the lowest cost by a contractor whose contract allows them to skim off the top. So we get shoddily built crap which manages to both cost a lot and be cheap at the same time. This then needs replacing in a few decades whilst the grand old ediface looks on.
So - radical idea - lets save money by spending money. We do not "save" money by cutting the schools budget or similar - we spend the unspent money on maintenance costs. How do we get past this mindset where any investment is seen as "cost" with "who will pay?" as the reflex question? Who pays if we *don't* spend. Its a lie that we can just cut budgets.
See we agree on this, if we are going to do it then do it properly. However that still does have to be paid for which is why I say we need to address the question of what we do spend on.
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
why is it fine for people to inherit wealth but blithely ignore the circumstances in which that wealth was accumulated?
She has inherited wealth? She didn't even know this guy was a relative. There is too much hand-wringing going on about sins of the past. Slavery is Bad. So the way to atone isn't to hand-wring, it is to go after modern slavers.
We have people still used as captive labour today, and we do almost nothing about it because the people doing so are rich. Do we really try to stop women being trafficked for sex work? Do we make Qatar a pariah state for enslaving foreign labourers and working some to death? No - we don't care about actual slavery. But virtue-signalling and blaming someone for something they haven't done is much easier.
ignorance is bliss, I guess she thought it was just completely normal her family just happened to own loads of land
Would you feel guilt if it turned out you had a monstrous ancestor?
My wife and I were saying at breakfast that this RAAC scandal typifies the UK's approach to economic development and that it was the same in the 60s and 70s so nothing has changed. Everything is built or made to solve today's problems and fuck the future. Those buildings were made with substandard concrete because the governments of the day didn't want to spend the money on proper concrete and now it's going to cost us 10x as much as today to solve this and replace all of the RAAC in buildings.
We do this in all walks of life too, the UK has got no economic resilience because we never want to spend the 10% extra at the right moments or we cut costs to point where everything behind the curtain is a shit fest.
Today everything is being cut to the bone and our economic resilience is basically zero because the government has decided to prioritise old age spending to buy votes. Back then the same generation who is benefiting from today's largesse decided to cut investment knowing that long term consequences for future generations would be dire.
The baby boomer generation is quite possibly the single most selfish to ever have existed, I hope the next Labour government has got the cojones to tax the fuck out of them, tax the fuck out of inheritance and properly tax high fixed incomes and rent seeking at a significantly higher rate than income. I have very little faith.
I'm a boomer and I agree with your last paragraph. Decades ago, one commentator said it was as though a whole generation was waiting for the adults to turn up and get a grip.
Knowing what I know now, I reckon my parents' generation were either just too exhausted or in many cases too mentally fragile from WWII to cope with teenagers letting rip. So most of us just went on letting rip; and in different ways still are.
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
why is it fine for people to inherit wealth but blithely ignore the circumstances in which that wealth was accumulated?
She has inherited wealth? She didn't even know this guy was a relative. There is too much hand-wringing going on about sins of the past. Slavery is Bad. So the way to atone isn't to hand-wring, it is to go after modern slavers.
We have people still used as captive labour today, and we do almost nothing about it because the people doing so are rich. Do we really try to stop women being trafficked for sex work? Do we make Qatar a pariah state for enslaving foreign labourers and working some to death? No - we don't care about actual slavery. But virtue-signalling and blaming someone for something they haven't done is much easier.
ignorance is bliss, I guess she thought it was just completely normal her family just happened to own loads of land
Would you feel guilt if it turned out you had a monstrous ancestor?
My mother grew up in foster care cos her mother abandoned her and her brothers. However I don't feel guilt as I gained no benefit from those actions.
We're talking millions of pounds to survey a roof in a corridor in order to make sure they know where the problems are... Every time another problem arises, they have to go back and do another survey," she said.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
Isn't the problem with RAAC that it is impossible to predict structural failure by external survey?
Yes, it needs to be replaced, I read on Friday the national bill for this could end up being £30-40bn just for publicly owned buildings.
Its all just so short-sighted. Build cheap and build often. We have these grand old buildings - often built at public expense - left to crumble, then we replace them with something built at the lowest cost by a contractor whose contract allows them to skim off the top. So we get shoddily built crap which manages to both cost a lot and be cheap at the same time. This then needs replacing in a few decades whilst the grand old ediface looks on.
So - radical idea - lets save money by spending money. We do not "save" money by cutting the schools budget or similar - we spend the unspent money on maintenance costs. How do we get past this mindset where any investment is seen as "cost" with "who will pay?" as the reflex question? Who pays if we *don't* spend. Its a lie that we can just cut budgets.
We very clearly have had for years government of both parties (and a civil service) which don't understand the principles of investment, or how to contact work at rates which constitute value. Or how to learn from their mistakes.
That goes across infrastructure, energy, health, education and defence - actually everything, probably.
Clearly there are exceptions to the rule, from time to time, but that is the default.
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
It would be impossible to get elected on such a program so, as a solution to anything, it's bollocks.
We will have no choice but to do it sooner or later
Why? I am sure some three monitor wanker will know more but countries run massive debt-fuelled deficits for decades. They just periodically have periods of high inflation and occasionally default.
Without the discipline of being in the Euro there is no reason to suppose that the UK can't go down that crooked path.
It would help a lot if our utilities were not owned by foreigners. We just wind up exporting money abroad.
I noticed last week that the company which manages the electricity infrastructure in Yorkshire seems to be owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
Comments
I wonder how many of the nearly 30 million households in UK regard themselves as wealthy?
Why does she need to apologise for the actions of her ancestors? Ones that she only just found out existed? Is she responsible for them?
Still Tories best chance of denying Sir Kid Starver a majority
Main one is Prisoner's Dilemma. The temptation to make a deal like that and then he the first one to break it, leaving the other lot holding the poonami'd baby, would be too big to ignore.
The other one is that it would only take one external populist to bring that down. "LABCON are just the same as each other, telling you lies to keep you poor..." Don't think that can be done? Ask Nigel Farage.
It's an unfortunate bit of Hunan nature, but something about Britain and our system magnifies it. Did anyone ask Nigel Lawson if his tax cuts were sustainable? Or did we all say "thanks for the extra dosh"?
In addition you cant really slice it that simply because dividing total tax payers by 3 or 6 to get will still end up with you some very poor families relatively speaking for example the 8th decile averages 74931 gross household income.....that is a couple earning 37k each
https://www.statista.com/statistics/813364/average-gross-income-per-household-uk/#:~:text=Average gross income per household in the,2021/22, by decile group&text=Households in the bottom decile,earned 196,638 pounds per year.
Recent Govt interest payments have jumped by approx £50bn per annum, which is 7% or so of Govt expenditure. If, as forecast, there is a corresponding reduction after the next Election, that would be headroom for Mr Starmer.
There are also all kinds of necessary tax reforms delayed until after the Election that the current Govt are too cowardly to tackle now (raising revenue from Electric Vehicles is one obvious one), in the hope of buying some votes. Is there more leeway there?
At present imo he is making similar mistakes to Mr Brown - "we'll follow Tory policies".
But how politically to present it?
Dame Margaret Eve Hodge, Lady Hodge, DBE is a British politician serving as the Member of Parliament for Barking
I do love it though. We have a real crisis in education because the Tories scrapped Labour's schools programme, so that once again we have kids not able to go back to school or facing life in portacabins. And your response is that you'd rather keep the Tories in power.
I'm not voting Labour. But its absolutely clear that they have to be elected to government with as many Tories removed from the Commons as possible. But you have no concerns about the Tories carrying on because only a handful of people will vote for your preferred True Socialism?
Borrowing - HoC Library via Google:
This borrowing is known as 'public sector net borrowing' but is often referred to as the deficit. In the financial year 2022/23, government revenue – from taxes and other receipts – was £1,017 billion while government spending was £1,155 billion. The deficit was therefore £137 billion, equivalent to 5.4% of GDP
Households in UK:
There were an estimated 28.2 million households in the UK in 2022; 6.1% or 1.6 million more households than there were in 2012 (26.6 million households). The average household size remained similar over the last 10 years, with 2.36 residents per household in both 2012 and in 2022.
ONS
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2022#:~:text=Households-,There were an estimated 28.2 million households in the%2
We aren't spending money on refugee processing. The choice not to spend money or not spend money as you suggest. Whatever we save on not funding the home office and the legal system we spend on emergency hotel accommodation and deathtrap barges and protracted planning aggro to turn ex US Airbases into gulags.
There is not a spend no money option as you suggest. The money needed is already there, it is just being burnt. So redirect money into processing refugees and you remove the spend on everything else which is required by not doing so.
One work out how much tax we can milk from the country
Two work out how much we need to properly fund all the things the state does (we should also look at the various big headers and ask at this point should we do all of the parts that make up this big item. An example for instance is should we be offering all the procedures the nhs provides
Three prioritise all the things the state does
Then we simply go down the list and draw a line where tax revenue runs out on that list and stop doing everything below the line. Will it hurt yes of course, however it is the only way we get out of the mess
Besides, it's relatively easy to make the budget balance in one year. All you do is extend the replacement cycles for buildings and infrastructure and not spend on new equipment. See 2010. In the immediate term, that causes no problems whatsoever.
But individuals and families apologising for things like this just seems like a total waste of time and usually nothing more than self indulgent attention grabbing through faux empathy, as I do not believe people are feeling deep personal guilt over the fact an ancestor centuries ago did horrible stuff, they are just prostrating themselves in some ritual behaviour to gain some weird social credit. In this case it's not that, but because she was reported to have tried to 'hide' it, and so is presumably trying to shortcut further criticism, as bondegezou alludes to.
Sir Kid Starver and Austerity Reeves will have a Manifesto outflanking the BoJo Tories to the right
All hale Sir Kid Starver
And because politics is a win at any cost exercise now more than ever there is advantage in telling people what they want to hear.
What we spend as front line provision isn't the issue. Schools aren't broken because of woke teachers wasting money on inappropriate school trips. Services are broken because of all the money syphoned away from front line provision into administration, contract management, legal fees etc etc etc. Instead of spending education money building new schools to replace dangerous crumbling ones, the money was given to build free schools where the budget didn't matter, nor did the ocean of cash being hoovered into the pockets of the people running them and the other trusts.
So I'm not sure that we can adequately calculate how much we need to properly fund things when so much cash is basically being pocketed by a spiv class who are in it for themselves.
And yet apparently they don't, according to you, since people liked it so much they voted to have them by supporting Boris Johnson! And despite your claim that Keir has gone even further to the right than the present government, another more common claim is that he would simply make no difference from the present government - meaning by your logic Keir would be promoting many of Corbyn's policies.
Corbyn had great appeal with some groups, but had too much baggage for the bulk of the country. Corbynism without Corbyn may well indeed have been more popular.
When I awoke it was bright and sunny. Now all the doings of the early morning are completed it’s grey and cloudy.
Our local secondary school is one of those hit hard by the RAAC problem. There’s talk of closing the Village Hall to accommodate some classes.
However the choice is another 5 years of the Tories or Labour. Your socialist purity test is fine with a different voting system but all you’re doing is enabling the Tories .
Would you still feel this way if the Tories manifesto included a withdrawal from the ECHR ? What do they have to do for you to hold your nose and vote Labour ?
So, the deficit goes up and down. It is higher now in part because of COVID-19 and energy costs spiralling because of the war in Ukraine. One might also suggest that it is high now because of Conservative incompetence (e.g. save a small amount on not employing enough Home Office staff, end up paying a large amount on asylum seekers awaiting decisions).
Also, the country has run deficits for most of the last several decades. You can run a deficit if the economy is growing, so debt still falls as a proportion of GDP. So, you can’t take £100B per annum or £137B per annum and declare that we have to immediately raise that much more tax. Yes, it is a relevant figure, but it’s not “you have to raise tax to deal with this in one year”. You can grow the economy, you can cut the deficit over time.
You then give figures per “million tax payers/households”, but tax payers are not the same as households. Those are figures per household. A household may have more than one taxpayer. By taking a figure per household, you get a scarier figure than one per taxpayer. Also, you effectively ignore corporation taxes by presuming personal taxes have to cover the increase alone.
So, yes, there is a deficit and current interest on borrowing is high. However, you overegg the argument to get a more dramatic figure than is correct.
Until this changes, and the 'low tax high spend' stuff is starting to run out of road, maybe it should be the task of smaller parties to make it their useful USP that they do their maths in public and tell it how it is. Like telling us how much the NHS would cost to run properly and so on, and what effect it would have on tax.
Democracy's reliance on ignorance is a grave weakness.
By the way if I had my way his contract would have been terminated and told he has no future with the club
My turn to ask then as I put up when challenged I expect you to do the same.
If the state continues to do all it does now and full funds it how many extra billion do you think the state needs to take from people?
ULEZ is an interesting example of the dangers of going with the opinion polls to announce an apparently popular policy. Most people are vaguely in favour - cleaner air, what's not to like? - but the minority affected and the larger number who think they might be affected are passinately against. If you annouynce a policy early, it gives the media time to erode support for it.
I do of course worry that in reality he really doesn't plan to do anything! But I think that's unlikely.
I believe the state can do what it does now better. Instead of the false economy of cutting costs leading to worse public services that then leads to a less productive population, I believe we can save money in the long term by investing in public services. Invest so you have a healthier population, invest so the courts work, invest so the immigration system works, invest so you have a more educated population, invest in innovation. I also believe in higher taxes to pay for better public services, not just to make us more productive, but so we have nicer lives. Plenty of our European neighbours have higher taxation than us. We’re not near some mythical maximum possible tax take.
These narratives of doom and decline end up just excusing government incompetence. We can do things better.
Without the discipline of being in the Euro there is no reason to suppose that the UK can't go down that crooked path.
Of course a Labour government will be different. I’m not claiming Starmer will be fantastic — I’m in his constituency and I didn’t vote for him last election — but he’ll be different from the current administration.
Khan's messaging was and remains poor, but Conservative re-editing of the ULEZ narrative is quite remarkable.
Both were a le and in fact he has done the total opposite.
As Compass Director Neal Lawson puts it the Foxes have been put in charge of the Chicken Coop
https://twitter.com/PoliticsJOE_UK/status/1697203403154407583
Sir Kid Starver is a weak nickname.
"lower use of OOH (Out of Hours) services, fewer acute hospital admissions, and lower mortality. The presence of a dose–response relationship between continuity and these outcomes indicates that the associations are causal."
Similtaneously it also improves both patient satisfaction and job satisfaction of staff.
https://bjgp.org/content/72/715/e84?ijkey=1435bcba80b63b8d30b2b1173ea0161ce2337f2f&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
It really should be a no brainer, but one explicitly ruled out in our NHS recently.
https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1726.full
Poor productivity in the NHS is both a major problem clinically and financially, and also very fixable, with a quick turnaround in terms of cost savings and outcomes.
I am sure the same is true in both secondary and tertiary care too.
Millions for ...a survey o_O ?
This will have to do for the moment.
We’re 40 miles from London.
Doctor dog is another very effective healthcare initiative. Exercise and companionship.
Anyway, breaking news, Manchester Utd signed TWO STRIKERS seconds before the 11 o’clock deadline.
A junior doctor from Chelsea. And a train driver from York. 😄
In order to enrich yourself?
The country is crying out for change neither of the 2 main Parties offer any at all
We do this in all walks of life too, the UK has got no economic resilience because we never want to spend the 10% extra at the right moments or we cut costs to point where everything behind the curtain is a shit fest.
Today everything is being cut to the bone and our economic resilience is basically zero because the government has decided to prioritise old age spending to buy votes. Back then the same generation who is benefiting from today's largesse decided to cut investment knowing that long term consequences for future generations would be dire.
The baby boomer generation is quite possibly the single most selfish to ever have existed, I hope the next Labour government has got the cojones to tax the fuck out of them, tax the fuck out of inheritance and properly tax high fixed incomes and rent seeking at a significantly higher rate than income. I have very little faith.
The growth of the centralised State placed far more power into the hands of governments to raise vast armies and deliver lethal violence. The restraints that the Catholic Church had imposed upon warfare in medieval times had disappeared. And all sides now believed God was on their side.
Like running a cult is going to solve anything
We have people still used as captive labour today, and we do almost nothing about it because the people doing so are rich. Do we really try to stop women being trafficked for sex work? Do we make Qatar a pariah state for enslaving foreign labourers and working some to death? No - we don't care about actual slavery. But virtue-signalling and blaming someone for something they haven't done is much easier.
I’ve discovered that some of my ancestors fought in 17th century Ireland, and I’m quite sure they acted as 17th century soldiers did. I see no reason to apologise.
And what restraints on warfare did the Catholic Church impose?
Also, the Man Utd incomings are people the manager has previously worked with. He has come from a minor club, should the club of Man Utd give him the comfort blanket of players he had previously worked with? this is Man Utd, surely they should be fishing in a different pool than just the managers former players? After the managers expensive Anthony fiasco, should he have been allowed to add such question marks of the expensive line leader at one end and exorbitantly pricey keeper?
4th place could quickly become aspirational for Man U.
Anyway, we are off to a picnic, you will have to pick the bones out of it yourself today. 🙋♀️
So - radical idea - lets save money by spending money. We do not "save" money by cutting the schools budget or similar - we spend the unspent money on maintenance costs. How do we get past this mindset where any investment is seen as "cost" with "who will pay?" as the reflex question? Who pays if we *don't* spend. Its a lie that we can just cut budgets.
Is the problem with the boomer generation that they're uniquely selfish, or just that they're uniquely numerous which allows them to enact the selfishness that most people would do, given the chance?
Especially now that their parents, the ones who actually experienced wartime deprivation, have passed on and aren't there as a living reality check.
The practical effect is the same, natch, but the political problem and solution is slightly different.
As for government policy after the next election, it doesn't matter what the manifestoes say. Overall, we're going to be paying more for less.
Disruption caused by Stop ULEZ = good
Knowing what I know now, I reckon my parents' generation were either just too exhausted or in many cases too mentally fragile from WWII to cope with teenagers letting rip. So most of us just went on letting rip; and in different ways still are.
Perhaps it is because the bigger Labour gets, the more nut jobs they allow in and the further it gets away from the country.
The point of Labour is to govern and to win power. Not me who said that, Clement Attlee did.
That goes across infrastructure, energy, health, education and defence - actually everything, probably.
Clearly there are exceptions to the rule, from time to time, but that is the default.
Scottish beaches have eight times more sewage debris than English ones
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scottish-beaches-have-eight-times-more-sewage-debris-than-english-ones-w27nssbq5