If IHT is tinkered with I think the furthest the government will go is potentially increasing the primary homes allowance from £500k to £600k which would cover a pretty big increment of the blue wall oldies at £1.2m per couple and blue wall boomers who want to inherit. Reducing the headline rate or increasing the non-housing allowance seem completely out of the question.
Er, how do you make that out? The primary homes allowance or rather RNRB is 175K per person = of course 350K for a married couple (only) - tough shite if one is single or an aunt/uncle.
Edit: of course, that depends on having children.
The maximum allowance per person is 325 basic plus RNRB = 500K. But IIRC the RNRB depnds on how big the estate is. It also depnds on having a hosue worth 350K - ie if the house is worth less the allowance is not transferable to other assets. It's a huge bung to Tory'voting pensioners in the south.
Just raise the IHT threshold from £325k to £1 million for all estates
Yes, yes, we got the message that your party doesn't believe in hard work any more.
On topic, I have been on a rather complicated journey with my views on IHT. My basic reaction for many years was to fundamentally disagree with the concept. I have gradually warmed to it over the years.
My current view is that the current way our society is structured makes for a tax on inherited wealth to be sensible. Most of our money is tied up in property, and as we live longer we are all putting more demands on the state re health and care costs. It seems to me more preferable that this is taken from you after your death than while you are alive. Additionally, while I fully understand and agree with the concept of being able to do something for your children after you have gone, if that creates and sustained extreme (note: extreme) wealth disparities that again are just going to get tied up in property assets at a time of a severe housing shortage that doesn’t feel particularly equitable to me.
Maybe I’m just doing the reverse of most people and becoming more of a lefty in my old age.
You’re not alone. On this issue I’ve moved left
We need some way of levelling the playing field for people who don’t inherit. The state taking a hefty chunk of estates worth more than £500,000 seems fair (and all the loopholes should be closed). But that money should then be ploughed into housebuilding (nice Georgian terraces, not redbrick horror boxes)
And I’m on a journey on architecture too. I used to hate the idea of pastiche buildings rather than embracing the future with nice clean lines and so on. Saw pastiche architecture as reactionary, unimaginative. I think like most in my generation I was conditioned by the awful mock this and that of the 1980s and the ugly neo-neo-classical wrecks that sprung up in Southern Europe.
However I now realise two things. First, that people like old styles of building and traditional street layouts, so why piss them off by building stuff they don’t want? And secondly, pastiche can be very good and effective if done properly. The key is done properly. Absolutely authentic to the original style not skimping with small windows or double garages on the side. Travelling in Europe for the last couple of decades I’ve come to realise how much of the pretty pretty mediaeval city centres were actually reconstructed post-war.
Old Tbilisi is a good example. Total 2000s Disney-Sakashvili pastiche in most places but very pretty.
I am in full agreement, however, what we really need is, I feel, an understanding by architects of the immutable qualities of beauty in architecture, and to plan and build within guidelines inspired by those qualities. Some could be pastiche, some modern.
That link is interesting, but imo it is a set of talking points about what a thing LOOKS LIKE, and does not consider how a place works or is socially organised. If you like, imo it is almost a decorator talking about architecture, and quite postmodern that it talks about surfaces and facades.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though. Oft-repeated, but true.
It's not so long since Georgian architecture was cheap, nasty, old fashioned and ripe for demolition. Now some won't hear a word against it. IMO that's just another turn of fashion.
Beauty is also a matter of fashion - for that you can just look at human fashion; in a fairly short time we have gone from lissom to bodacious as the 'approved' female look. Driven at least in part by a shift to a more screen-based culture, imo.
A similar trend can be seen in interior design even, where Stripped Out Scandi (roughly 'Ikea') has been replaced by Modern Hipster - all textures, colours and intricate bits. The latter also photos far more attractively to be displayed.
My most abstruse example of an industry revolving practice is perhaps junction boxes in electrical wiring - whether they are viewed as "to standard" or not. Every generation or so the position reverses (afaics), and more lovely work for the next lot of electricians.
About 6 years ago my lettings agent told me that if I had 2 student house interiors fairly modestly redesigned / redecorated from Stripped out Scandi to Modern Hipster, he could get me a 25% rent increase the next year. And it worked - he achieved more than that. That is by matching desired perception.
If anyone wants I can PM you an article I wrote about the new design.
There's also a need for those in the industry to find ways to create a living - that is by changing the taste so they get more work. Chintz and Gingham Checks will be back in due course; it's interesting how eg Kilner have turned the latter into a brand identifier on their jars.
But 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' isn't true, and in many ways is where we've been going wrong. There are certain things we all find beautiful, in people as well as buildings and art, and yes, fashion, personal predilections and the desire for the new has an impact, but there are still primeval qualities, which in humans connote good breeding material, and in buildings, safety, security and plenty. It's the 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' approach that in the 1960s thinks you can chuck up a brittle, dirty, concrete and glass tower block and it will one day be cherished like a Morningside tenement. It won't, and an understanding of why we find buildings beautiful tells us why it won't. If architects understood these concepts and worked within them, buildings could be stunningly modern, still beautiful, and we could produce buildings as revered as the Georgians and Victorians.
There was a really interesting series on R4 at the back of 9 recently by an architect who had consulted psychologists. What he found was that clean lines and sparse outlines actually caused depression and had measurable effects on peoples health. The human eye and brain needs a bit of detail and a more human scale to feel comfortable. It was a thought provoking series although I couldn't help feeling it would have made better TV with pictures.
I am sure that's correct. That's why the famous Brutalist architect whose name escapes me lived in a Tudor Manor house. You'd like the video in the quote nest if you haven't seen it.
I like a mixture of both. We’re renovating our French barn at the moment and it’ll be a mix of mediaeval stone barn and modernist metal and glass. The most important thing though, to me, is generous dimensions, decent ventilation and plenty of light.
My least favourite architectural style by far is the poky 1980s house with tiny windows and carpeted loo. Followed by badly built late Victorian neo-gothic, of which there are lots of examples around here,
Sure, but this discussion is about beauty. Your glass and metal barn extension might be beautiful, or it might not. The mere presence of glass and metal is neither here nor there.
I like Victorian Neo-gothic, though some is better than other. I didn't love Atkinson Morley hospital when my Mum was being treated for cancer. But as styles go, it's decorative and fun. The Victorians never went far wrong in my book.
Edwardian for me. The right balance between liveable interior and attractive exterior, between function and form, between style and substance, between mouth and trousers.
If I had complete choice, which I don’t in London of course, it would be ancient. Mediaeval or ideally earlier, ur-architecture. Carved out of the rock or hefted over a few half-fossilised stumps, or constructed with local serf labour to loom over the Champaign. Big stone hollow in the wall for baking. A well outside. Priesthole. Ancient graffiti on an old oak chest. Secret tunnel to the church. Then a large Georgian extension and Victorian orangerie.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
It will all come out in years to come but I understand some battles have been akin to WWI engagements, with the sort of utterly horrific figures on both sides that we thought had been consigned to the past.
That should maybe be Ukraine’s aim - accept for now the painful and horrible loss of territory. It’s bleak and sad and immoral but there we are
I don't think VVP can settle for the territory the RF has now; it doesn't stack up to the price Russia has paid.
He needs Odessa as a minimum and ideally a land bridge to the PMR. That's still well short of the objectives that Lavrov articulated as necessary for halting the SMO but he could sell that to the people who matter in Russia (oligarchs, criminals and raving nationalists on TV).
Yes hardly a 'win' is it. An interesting question that occurs is you sit Putin down the day before he invades and you offer him 'this' 21 months later. What expression comes over his cheeky little face?
Odessa is a pipe dream, now, for Russia.
What they now hold is the maximum they can hope for
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
I feel sorry for Zekensky. A genuinely inspiring leader but the brutal facts of war are now against him
Over the winter the Russians will renew their hideous pounding of Ukrainian cities and infra. Grinding away the will to fight
And then, come the spring? What can Zelenskyy do? He hasn’t the troops to force any kind of new offensive and victory, Russia is still entrenched behind six billion landmines. It’s a tragic stalemate
There is a lot more room for manoeuvre and progress east of the Dnipro river than there is further east. There are logistical challenges of getting enough equipment and men over a river a km wide in places but the Ukrainians are driving the Russians back far enough to make a pontoon safe from artillery.
What the last several months have shown is that the modern hi-tech western armour has not been anything like the breakthrough or game changer that was hoped. Attacking remains way more difficult than defending as the Russians are finding at Adiivka and the armour simply has not changed that.
Yes. That is the lesson. Modern technology allows drones and robots to lay mines at such an astounding rate - thousands a minute - no attacking force can get through
“Chinese strategists have followed these discussions closely, of course, and are particularly attuned to the major role that landmines have played in the Ukraine War. That conflict increasingly shows signs of becoming a stalemate, as defensive technologies, such as man-portable air defense and anti-tank systems have demonstrated their value. A mid-2023 detailed Chinese-language survey of landmine warfare in the Ukraine War yields the conclusion that mines have played the most important role in stymieing the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The article states, “Landmines…as everyone knows, are easy to sow, but hard to remove.””
“On a top floor of Kyiv's Cabinet of Ministers building, Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and two advisers huddle around a laptop. A map of the country is on the screen, overlaid with a honeycomb pattern of hexagonal tiles, ranging from pale yellow to blood red. As the group types questions into a chatbot, filtering for areas close to schools or power lines, the model zooms into the satellite imagery until a field with individual trees becomes visible. A red bubble with an exclamation point marks a suspected landmine. A staffer clicks a button, creating a request to dispatch a demining team to clear it.”
Multiply that by millions. If you need a full demining *team* to clear *one* mine then you are totally fucked. This is not a serious approach. If they are really doing this then they have lost.
Yes, it’s quite forlorn
Russia has laid MILLIONS of mines and experts say it can literally lay 1000s every hour, far faster than they can be cleared
How do you get round that? I guess paratroop over them, attack from the Black Sea…. But these are pipe dreams
Mines are almost solely defensive.
I can't see a way Russia takes Odessa, absent a total Ukrainian collapse.
IHT is unpopular partly as it is a death tax on estates and assets often made from income previously taxed and having faced council tax etc too.
The threshold at £325k is also not far off the average UK property price so more estates are potentially hit, certainly those not able to benefit from the additional £175k spousal allowance on the main residence
It's not unusual to tax money again. Look at income from bank accounts and investments?
I wonder if IHT is unpopular partly because people see a big pre tax amount and then they see the tax being taken away in one big lump leaving them with a lot less? Taxes that are less visible or that don't get taken in one big lump are less likely to provoke a feeling of something that was yours being taken away, maybe.
IHT is unpopular partly as it is a death tax on estates and assets often made from income previously taxed and having faced council tax etc too.
The threshold at £325k is also not far off the average UK property price so more estates are potentially hit, certainly those not able to benefit from the additional £175k spousal allowance on the main residence
It's not unusual to tax money again. Look at income from bank accounts and investments?
Those are only taxed on the interest not the capital.
One possible solution might be to only tax the increase in value over general inflation since the property was last purchased.
If IHT is tinkered with I think the furthest the government will go is potentially increasing the primary homes allowance from £500k to £600k which would cover a pretty big increment of the blue wall oldies at £1.2m per couple and blue wall boomers who want to inherit. Reducing the headline rate or increasing the non-housing allowance seem completely out of the question.
Er, how do you make that out? The primary homes allowance or rather RNRB is 175K per person = of course 350K for a married couple (only) - tough shite if one is single or an aunt/uncle.
Edit: of course, that depends on having children.
The maximum allowance per person is 325 basic plus RNRB = 500K. But IIRC the RNRB depnds on how big the estate is. It also depnds on having a hosue worth 350K - ie if the house is worth less the allowance is not transferable to other assets. It's a huge bung to Tory'voting pensioners in the south.
Just raise the IHT threshold from £325k to £1 million for all estates
Yes, yes, we got the message that your party doesn't believe in hard work any more.
Our party believes in inherited wealth as it has always done, especially wealth created and already taxed during peoples' working lives.
Plus even inheriting £1 million would only enable you to lead a very average lifestyle if you never did any paid work. You would need to inherit about £2.5 million to be in the top 10% of incomes without working and you would need to inherit about £10 million+ to be in the top 1% by annual income and the latter 2 groups would still pay IHT on most of the estate inherited even with a £1 million threshold for IHT
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
It will all come out in years to come but I understand some battles have been akin to WWI engagements, with the sort of utterly horrific figures on both sides that we thought had been consigned to the past.
Yeah it’s horrific, WW1 trench warfare
This is why I can’t see that an Armistice on the present lines is much of a win for Putin, His army has been chewed to pieces and his military humiliated. And all for a strip of coastline that is now devastated by war which he has to rebuild
But he might prefer this qualified gain compared to even greater losses if he tries to attack - the Russian voters certainly would
IHT is unpopular partly as it is a death tax on estates and assets often made from income previously taxed and having faced council tax etc too.
The threshold at £325k is also not far off the average UK property price so more estates are potentially hit, certainly those not able to benefit from the additional £175k spousal allowance on the main residence
It's not unusual to tax money again. Look at income from bank accounts and investments?
Those are only taxed on the interest not the capital.
One possible solution might be to only tax the increase in value over general inflation since the property was last purchased.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
It will all come out in years to come but I understand some battles have been akin to WWI engagements, with the sort of utterly horrific figures on both sides that we thought had been consigned to the past.
Yeah it’s horrific, WW1 trench warfare
This is why I can’t see that an Armistice on the present lines is much of a win for Putin, His army has been chewed to pieces and his military humiliated. And all for a strip of coastline that is now devastated by war which he has to rebuild
But he might prefer this qualified gain compared to even greater losses if he tries to attack - the Russian voters certainly would
He's got four provinces of Ukraine and a solid landbridge/link to Crimea. They've gained a lot of territory and Ukraine has lost it.
I'm sure he and his bunch of hooligans could spin that as a win if they put their minds to it.
IHT is unpopular partly as it is a death tax on estates and assets often made from income previously taxed and having faced council tax etc too.
The threshold at £325k is also not far off the average UK property price so more estates are potentially hit, certainly those not able to benefit from the additional £175k spousal allowance on the main residence
It's not unusual to tax money again. Look at income from bank accounts and investments?
I wonder if IHT is unpopular partly because people see a big pre tax amount and then they see the tax being taken away in one big lump leaving them with a lot less? Taxes that are less visible or that don't get taken in one big lump are less likely to provoke a feeling of something that was yours being taken away, maybe.
Isn't the tax levied on the estate not the recipient?
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
It will all come out in years to come but I understand some battles have been akin to WWI engagements, with the sort of utterly horrific figures on both sides that we thought had been consigned to the past.
Yeah it’s horrific, WW1 trench warfare
This is why I can’t see that an Armistice on the present lines is much of a win for Putin, His army has been chewed to pieces and his military humiliated. And all for a strip of coastline that is now devastated by war which he has to rebuild
But he might prefer this qualified gain compared to even greater losses if he tries to attack - the Russian voters certainly would
Russian presidential election is in March next year, Putin will want Russia to clearly have secured the Donbass alongside Russian presence in Crimea at least by then
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
That should maybe be Ukraine’s aim - accept for now the painful and horrible loss of territory. It’s bleak and sad and immoral but there we are
I don't think VVP can settle for the territory the RF has now; it doesn't stack up to the price Russia has paid.
He needs Odessa as a minimum and ideally a land bridge to the PMR. That's still well short of the objectives that Lavrov articulated as necessary for halting the SMO but he could sell that to the people who matter in Russia (oligarchs, criminals and raving nationalists on TV).
Yes hardly a 'win' is it. An interesting question that occurs is you sit Putin down the day before he invades and you offer him 'this' 21 months later. What expression comes over his cheeky little face?
Odessa is a pipe dream, now, for Russia.
What they now hold is the maximum they can hope for
After suffering beyond measure for millions Russia is now marginally (but unofficially) bigger than it was.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
I feel sorry for Zekensky. A genuinely inspiring leader but the brutal facts of war are now against him
Over the winter the Russians will renew their hideous pounding of Ukrainian cities and infra. Grinding away the will to fight
And then, come the spring? What can Zelenskyy do? He hasn’t the troops to force any kind of new offensive and victory, Russia is still entrenched behind six billion landmines. It’s a tragic stalemate
There is a lot more room for manoeuvre and progress east of the Dnipro river than there is further east. There are logistical challenges of getting enough equipment and men over a river a km wide in places but the Ukrainians are driving the Russians back far enough to make a pontoon safe from artillery.
What the last several months have shown is that the modern hi-tech western armour has not been anything like the breakthrough or game changer that was hoped. Attacking remains way more difficult than defending as the Russians are finding at Adiivka and the armour simply has not changed that.
Yes. That is the lesson. Modern technology allows drones and robots to lay mines at such an astounding rate - thousands a minute - no attacking force can get through
“Chinese strategists have followed these discussions closely, of course, and are particularly attuned to the major role that landmines have played in the Ukraine War. That conflict increasingly shows signs of becoming a stalemate, as defensive technologies, such as man-portable air defense and anti-tank systems have demonstrated their value. A mid-2023 detailed Chinese-language survey of landmine warfare in the Ukraine War yields the conclusion that mines have played the most important role in stymieing the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The article states, “Landmines…as everyone knows, are easy to sow, but hard to remove.””
“On a top floor of Kyiv's Cabinet of Ministers building, Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and two advisers huddle around a laptop. A map of the country is on the screen, overlaid with a honeycomb pattern of hexagonal tiles, ranging from pale yellow to blood red. As the group types questions into a chatbot, filtering for areas close to schools or power lines, the model zooms into the satellite imagery until a field with individual trees becomes visible. A red bubble with an exclamation point marks a suspected landmine. A staffer clicks a button, creating a request to dispatch a demining team to clear it.”
Multiply that by millions. If you need a full demining *team* to clear *one* mine then you are totally fucked. This is not a serious approach. If they are really doing this then they have lost.
Yes, it’s quite forlorn
Russia has laid MILLIONS of mines and experts say it can literally lay 1000s every hour, far faster than they can be cleared
How do you get round that? I guess paratroop over them, attack from the Black Sea…. But these are pipe dreams
You don't have to.
What's needed is to destroy the Russian military until it is reduced to a light infantry force.
Something which the Russians are helping with by launching pointless attacks of their own.
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when heavy death duties and land taxes and estates duties were applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse, as they are attacking through gruesome minefields
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
It does seem like an overegg from Leon. However his main point (that Russia are entrenched in place now) is not discredited imo. It is looking that way.
What I don't like about IHT is its intrusiveness. For example, we give monthly allowances to our grandchildren while they are studying. In order for these "gifts" not to fall foul of IHT we must show that these payments come out of regular income. And to do that we have to declare 7 years of our income and expenditure including all gifts over £200 on a detailed form with categories specified by the tax authorities. What business is this of the state?
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
It will all come out in years to come but I understand some battles have been akin to WWI engagements, with the sort of utterly horrific figures on both sides that we thought had been consigned to the past.
Yeah it’s horrific, WW1 trench warfare
This is why I can’t see that an Armistice on the present lines is much of a win for Putin, His army has been chewed to pieces and his military humiliated. And all for a strip of coastline that is now devastated by war which he has to rebuild
But he might prefer this qualified gain compared to even greater losses if he tries to attack - the Russian voters certainly would
He's got four provinces of Ukraine and a solid landbridge/link to Crimea. They've gained a lot of territory and Ukraine has lost it.
I'm sure he and his bunch of hooligans could spin that as a win if they put their minds to it.
If they'd done that a little more than a year ago (before Ukraine's Kherson adventure), then they'd potentially have much more territory at a *lot* less cost. Putin can call a 'win' whenever he wants, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it is for Russia.
When there is a 'peace' (and I doubt any peace under Putin will be long-lasting), it'll be interesting to see how sanctions play into the peace. Putin will want them all lifting in response. Those calls should be resisted. A slow loosening of sanctions dependent on Russia becoming a civilised member of the international community.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
So we can assume you believe inheriting or preserving wealth is more important than creating new wealth.
Does it matter to you if the wealth of this country is increasingly in foreign possession ?
Which is an inevitable consequence of less wealth being created than consumed.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
A more likely assumption is that personnel casualties are similar in proportion to equipment losses.
Which would be a ratio of 3:1 Russian to Ukrainian - perhaps higher given the unwillingness to learn from mistakes that Russia seems to have.
No, that is surely not right
Remember we are not talking about the early stages of the war, when Russia fucked everything up, we are talking about a failed counter offensive by Ukraine
All the reports say that, unfortunately, the Russians have really upped their game, they defend with more skill than they attack. Ukraine has struggled terribly, as we see
And, anecdotally
“ABC News spoke with two former U.S. soldiers who are contracted in a special forces division of the Ukrainian military and who were both injured during an operation in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago.
Both soldiers are currently in a hospital in Kyiv but said they hope to be transferred to Germany for surgery this week in order to remove shrapnel from their bodies.
The men said their team's mission was to seize control of a village on the outskirts of Donetsk city, which has been occupied by a Russian-controlled militia since 2014.
One of the men, a former U.S. soldier from Texas who goes by the callsign "Tango," said his unit of "dozens" of men took "85% casualties" and that two of their comrades were killed when the team was ambushed whilst advancing into Russian-occupied territory. Forty percent of the unit was so badly injured they were rendered "combat ineffective," he said.”
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse, as they are attacking through gruesome minefields
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
As with most things is not quite so simple, Russia has been throwing its troops into the meat grinder in their own attempts at offensives in the north using similar tactics to bakhmut.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse, as they are attacking through gruesome minefields
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
As with most things is not quite so simple, Russia has been throwing its troops into the meat grinder in their own attempts at offensives in the north using similar tactics to bakhmut.
Indeed, and they are losing thousands of men as they attack
Whichever side attacks gets horrifically chewed up. That is why I cannot see far beyond a frozen war roughly where we are now
Russia can’t take Odessa, Ukraine can’t regain Crimea
All very depressing. I am going to watch Masterchef. Later
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
Good afternoon
I am a conservative and believe IHT as it is presently is fair and should not be a priority before improving the tax allowances on income.
Then I am pleased David Cameron is back at the top table, and not concerned by immigration especially as we need the 100,000 health workers, and I would be happy to be closer to Europe
However, it is all academic as Starmer and labour will win the next GE and have to deal with the chasm in expectations as they either have to freeze public sector spending or come up with billions and billions of new taxes
Frankly, I have no faith in any of our politicians to resolve the countries problems as the remedies are simply politically unacceptable
I find myself fairly ambivalent on IHT. I think there's an argument for raising the threshold (as has happened with income tax) but less for abolition.
The other problem I have, at a time when the Treasury needs every penny it can get and we are spending £7.5 billion a month on debt interest payments alone, is how we can afford it or, rather, how do you cover the shortfall in revenue? Every tax cut needs to be framed in the context of where the missing money is going to be found.If the response is borrowing, the problem then becomes the debt interest.
If we were running a large budget surplus, I'd happily support raising IHT thresholds but we aren't. If the only reason is to try to re-elect the Government, that makes political sense but it's fiscally incoherent.
We should be aiming to try to restore balance to the public finances but there are only two ways to achieve it, either by cutting spending or raising taxes (though sometimes both works). The Conservative profligacy needs to end and those responsible need to be held accountable.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
A more likely assumption is that personnel casualties are similar in proportion to equipment losses.
Which would be a ratio of 3:1 Russian to Ukrainian - perhaps higher given the unwillingness to learn from mistakes that Russia seems to have.
No, that is surely not right
Remember we are not talking about the early stages of the war, when Russia fucked everything up, we are talking about a failed counter offensive by Ukraine
All the reports say that, unfortunately, the Russians have really upped their game, they defend with more skill than they attack. Ukraine has struggled terribly, as we see
And, anecdotally
“ABC News spoke with two former U.S. soldiers who are contracted in a special forces division of the Ukrainian military and who were both injured during an operation in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago.
Both soldiers are currently in a hospital in Kyiv but said they hope to be transferred to Germany for surgery this week in order to remove shrapnel from their bodies.
The men said their team's mission was to seize control of a village on the outskirts of Donetsk city, which has been occupied by a Russian-controlled militia since 2014.
One of the men, a former U.S. soldier from Texas who goes by the callsign "Tango," said his unit of "dozens" of men took "85% casualties" and that two of their comrades were killed when the team was ambushed whilst advancing into Russian-occupied territory. Forty percent of the unit was so badly injured they were rendered "combat ineffective," he said.”
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
So we can assume you believe inheriting or preserving wealth is more important than creating new wealth.
Does it matter to you if the wealth of this country is increasingly in foreign possession ?
Which is an inevitable consequence of less wealth being created than consumed.
No, as I said I believe both are important. The more wealth is created, the more there is to inherit and preserve too.
Foreign ownership of many of our largest companies and some of the most expensive property in London is little to do with inherited wealth, if we had more old money families holding expensive London properties and running large family businesses it would indeed be less of an issue
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
Good afternoon
I am a conservative and believe IHT as it is presently is fair and should not be a priority before improving the tax allowances on income.
Then I am pleased David Cameron is back at the top table, and not concerned by immigration especially as we need the 100,000 health workers, and I would be happy to be closer to Europe
However, it is all academic as Starmer and labour will win the next GE and have to deal with the chasm in expectations as they either have to freeze public sector spending or come up with billions and billions of new taxes
Frankly, I have no faith in any of our politicians to resolve the countries problems as the remedies are simply politically unacceptable
Yes it's all looking good for LAB. Keir and team will have a BIG MESS to sort out 😡.
An unfair thing is that someone who has a house worth, say, only £80,000 would still have to spend 75% of it on nursing care costs. This happened to someone in my family recently.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
A more likely assumption is that personnel casualties are similar in proportion to equipment losses.
Which would be a ratio of 3:1 Russian to Ukrainian - perhaps higher given the unwillingness to learn from mistakes that Russia seems to have.
No, that is surely not right
Remember we are not talking about the early stages of the war, when Russia fucked everything up, we are talking about a failed counter offensive by Ukraine
All the reports say that, unfortunately, the Russians have really upped their game, they defend with more skill than they attack. Ukraine has struggled terribly, as we see
And, anecdotally
“ABC News spoke with two former U.S. soldiers who are contracted in a special forces division of the Ukrainian military and who were both injured during an operation in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago.
Both soldiers are currently in a hospital in Kyiv but said they hope to be transferred to Germany for surgery this week in order to remove shrapnel from their bodies.
The men said their team's mission was to seize control of a village on the outskirts of Donetsk city, which has been occupied by a Russian-controlled militia since 2014.
One of the men, a former U.S. soldier from Texas who goes by the callsign "Tango," said his unit of "dozens" of men took "85% casualties" and that two of their comrades were killed when the team was ambushed whilst advancing into Russian-occupied territory. Forty percent of the unit was so badly injured they were rendered "combat ineffective," he said.”
“How Russia learned from mistakes to slow Ukraine’s counteroffensive”
Russia has willingly destroyed another large chunk of its army by launching a failed offensive at Avdiivka.
Your underestimating how many casualties Russia is losing by needless attacks all along the front line.
And while Ukraine's attacks haven't made much progress they prompt Russian counterattacks and inflict heavy casualties on them.
...and if it was a war where the one with the most killed wins, that would matter. But it's a war of occupation. The metric of merit is the area occupied, not bodycount. If the Ukranians can't retake land, they aren't winning.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
If a sane market existed in who might be hit by a July 20th-style plot, Zelensky would have a MUCH higher price than Putin. The reasons being what you state here.
The other “known unknown” that is not talked about much re Ukraine, is that we have a Russian presidential election next year.
No, it will not be a free and fair election. But these things can have a habit of focusing minds, and exposing opposition.
If there truly are people in the Kremlin or military who are tired of the war, then engineering a situation where Putin is made to stand down at the election would give everything an air of legitimacy as opposed to tanks on the streets of Moscow. Similarly, Putin’s victory could bring out demonstrators, as happened in Belarus, and lead to instability. Russia is a tinderbox - it just needs a spark. And historically we have very rarely been aware of change in the Kremlin in advance - the first we know about it is when it happens. The coup against Krushchev. Yeltsin’s resignation.
Of course given the accepted wisdom that Putin’s control is still near absolute this could all be a damp squib.
But it needs to be talked about more, IMHO.
Concrete question: will Putin stand for re-election?
The election will be announced, and the official campaign period will begin, some time between 8 and 18 December.
On 13 September at the Eastern Economic Forum, Putin said he'll say one way or the other once the said period has begun.
Somewhat different news came out on 3 October in Kommersant. They reported that Putin was likely to announce at the opening of the "Rossiya" international expo-forum (~4 November) that hell yeah, he was going to stand. He didn't.
That forum is scheduled to continue until after the March election, so perhaps he'll still do it there.
A world where inheritance was illegal and you forfeited everything to the state when you died, with each new generation having to make its own way from scratch, whilst being unachievable both in theory and practice, would actually be a much better place.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
What are your workings?
You’re suggesting an an offensive in one quadrant doubled the total Ukrainian casualties in the war
I find myself fairly ambivalent on IHT. I think there's an argument for raising the threshold (as has happened with income tax) but less for abolition.
The other problem I have, at a time when the Treasury needs every penny it can get and we are spending £7.5 billion a month on debt interest payments alone, is how we can afford it or, rather, how do you cover the shortfall in revenue? Every tax cut needs to be framed in the context of where the missing money is going to be found.If the response is borrowing, the problem then becomes the debt interest.
If we were running a large budget surplus, I'd happily support raising IHT thresholds but we aren't. If the only reason is to try to re-elect the Government, that makes political sense but it's fiscally incoherent.
We should be aiming to try to restore balance to the public finances but there are only two ways to achieve it, either by cutting spending or raising taxes (though sometimes both works). The Conservative profligacy needs to end and those responsible need to be held accountable.
It's not even about re-electing the government really... In a way, that would be fair, so they can clear the minefield they are currently laying. (Imagine that photo of Boris and Mikey the day after the referendum, only more so.)
Most likely, the government's aim is to turn a catastrophe into a mere disaster. It's easy to see why they want to do that. But doing it at substantial cost to the public good... It's not particularly patriotic.
To nick an idea from a different context, a war with no realistic chance of victory can never really be Just.
Until last November there was a third weapon in our fiscal armoury: borrowing. Interest rates were dead cheap and the UK remained less leveraged than many economies (we still are).
Then because of global inflation annd interest rate rises, accelerated by some silly domestic behaviour, debt became unaffordable as an option.
But it shouldn’t be ruled out for future investment. The zero sum game we’re in now, where we either hike taxes or let public infrastructure and services collapse further, all the time struggling to stimulate growth, is not a particularly appealing vision for the future. The thing forcing it on us is the so called fiscal rules.
Several crises have shown that government can and does spend vast amounts bailing out the country by borrowing on capital markets when it has to. Well we’re in a crisis of growth and productivity now. It’s too expensive to borrow excessively now but…if and when gilt rates come down we should look at it.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
Reports from. Inside Kyiv say the politicians and generals are split. Some realise they cannot win, and need to negotiate, others say Zelensky is “messianic” in his conviction Ukraine can still prevail
But how? They lost maybe 50-100,000 men in the counter offensive and gained a couple of villages and about 5km of land
They can’t do that again. So what - in all honesty - is left to them?
Maybe their best bet is assassinating Putin. I cannot see any other military game changer
There's a lot of FUD and sh*t being spread around at the moment. As a 'journalist', you should be more than aware of this. And @Dura_Ace swims in fetid pools of the pro-Russian telegam channels. Which, whilst they give a different aspect of the war, might have similar, but opposite, biases to the stuff we all read.
It should also be remembered that Russia is the country that came nearest a coup, under six months ago.
Where did you get that 50-100,000 men figure from?
I plucked the figure out of my Cornish arse, but I think it’s a good guess
In August 2023 it was estimated Ukraine had lost at least 100,000 men in total
So you pulled it out of your posterior. Well done!
Spreading sh*t like that is just doing Putin's work for him. And from someone who thinks of himself as a 'journalist' ...
Oh FFS. This is as stupid as @TimS saying we mustn’t be negative about the war as it is “bad for PB morale”. I was unaware we had all been recruited to the Azov Regiment 2.0
We talk facts. For quite a while the facts were positive for Ukraine. They bravely fought off the Russians then superbly turned the tables
Now, not so much
No. *You* don't talk facts. You invent sh*t, as you did below.
Ok. What’s your estimate for Ukrainian dead and injured during the counter offensive?
It is obviously A LOT but understandably the Ukrainians don’t release figures so as to maintain PB morale
However, we can make semi-educated guesses. Mine is 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian casualties. Yours?
I've no idea, and any *guess* I made would be pulled out of my fragrant backside. Somewhere between 1 and (the population of Ukraine-1).
Er, that says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by AUGUST 2023, so it actually more pessimistic than my premise
If the Ukes lost that many before the most brutal stage - the counter offensive - really began, then again my estimate looks entirely reasonable, and possibly optimistic
I think people tend to ignore any figures in your posts. It's a shame because every so often they'll be correct but you've brought it on yourself.
General comment only rather than on Ukrainian war casualties.
Are his figures correct here? He claimed 50-100,000 on the counter offensive but those wiki figures are for the whole war (up to August).
I readily confess I am guessing. But if Wiki says 70,000 Ukrainian dead and 120,000 injured by August 2023 then my ballpark of 50-100,000 killed and injured in the entire counter offensive seems pretty reasonable, albeit shocking
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
A more likely assumption is that personnel casualties are similar in proportion to equipment losses.
Which would be a ratio of 3:1 Russian to Ukrainian - perhaps higher given the unwillingness to learn from mistakes that Russia seems to have.
No, that is surely not right
Remember we are not talking about the early stages of the war, when Russia fucked everything up, we are talking about a failed counter offensive by Ukraine
All the reports say that, unfortunately, the Russians have really upped their game, they defend with more skill than they attack. Ukraine has struggled terribly, as we see
And, anecdotally
“ABC News spoke with two former U.S. soldiers who are contracted in a special forces division of the Ukrainian military and who were both injured during an operation in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago.
Both soldiers are currently in a hospital in Kyiv but said they hope to be transferred to Germany for surgery this week in order to remove shrapnel from their bodies.
The men said their team's mission was to seize control of a village on the outskirts of Donetsk city, which has been occupied by a Russian-controlled militia since 2014.
One of the men, a former U.S. soldier from Texas who goes by the callsign "Tango," said his unit of "dozens" of men took "85% casualties" and that two of their comrades were killed when the team was ambushed whilst advancing into Russian-occupied territory. Forty percent of the unit was so badly injured they were rendered "combat ineffective," he said.”
“How Russia learned from mistakes to slow Ukraine’s counteroffensive”
Russia has willingly destroyed another large chunk of its army by launching a failed offensive at Avdiivka.
Your underestimating how many casualties Russia is losing by needless attacks all along the front line.
And while Ukraine's attacks haven't made much progress they prompt Russian counterattacks and inflict heavy casualties on them.
...and if it was a war where the one with the most killed wins, that would matter. But it's a war of occupation. The metric of merit is the area occupied, not bodycount. If the Ukranians can't retake land, they aren't winning.
Take a look at how much territory Germany controlled on 11/11/18.
But it had still lost.
Sometimes land is taken before armies are defeated and sometimes it happens afterwards.
Sometimes things happen quickly, sometimes slowly and sometimes slowly then quickly.
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
I feel sorry for Zekensky. A genuinely inspiring leader but the brutal facts of war are now against him
Over the winter the Russians will renew their hideous pounding of Ukrainian cities and infra. Grinding away the will to fight
And then, come the spring? What can Zelenskyy do? He hasn’t the troops to force any kind of new offensive and victory, Russia is still entrenched behind six billion landmines. It’s a tragic stalemate
There is a lot more room for manoeuvre and progress east of the Dnipro river than there is further east. There are logistical challenges of getting enough equipment and men over a river a km wide in places but the Ukrainians are driving the Russians back far enough to make a pontoon safe from artillery.
What the last several months have shown is that the modern hi-tech western armour has not been anything like the breakthrough or game changer that was hoped. Attacking remains way more difficult than defending as the Russians are finding at Adiivka and the armour simply has not changed that.
Yes. That is the lesson. Modern technology allows drones and robots to lay mines at such an astounding rate - thousands a minute - no attacking force can get through
“Chinese strategists have followed these discussions closely, of course, and are particularly attuned to the major role that landmines have played in the Ukraine War. That conflict increasingly shows signs of becoming a stalemate, as defensive technologies, such as man-portable air defense and anti-tank systems have demonstrated their value. A mid-2023 detailed Chinese-language survey of landmine warfare in the Ukraine War yields the conclusion that mines have played the most important role in stymieing the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The article states, “Landmines…as everyone knows, are easy to sow, but hard to remove.””
“On a top floor of Kyiv's Cabinet of Ministers building, Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and two advisers huddle around a laptop. A map of the country is on the screen, overlaid with a honeycomb pattern of hexagonal tiles, ranging from pale yellow to blood red. As the group types questions into a chatbot, filtering for areas close to schools or power lines, the model zooms into the satellite imagery until a field with individual trees becomes visible. A red bubble with an exclamation point marks a suspected landmine. A staffer clicks a button, creating a request to dispatch a demining team to clear it.”
Multiply that by millions. If you need a full demining *team* to clear *one* mine then you are totally fucked. This is not a serious approach. If they are really doing this then they have lost.
You have a team that works a location. Some in supporting roles some clearing mines.
The reality is they are identifying and prioritising minefields.
The guff about sending a request for a single mine is just that.
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
Good afternoon
I am a conservative and believe IHT as it is presently is fair and should not be a priority before improving the tax allowances on income.
Then I am pleased David Cameron is back at the top table, and not concerned by immigration especially as we need the 100,000 health workers, and I would be happy to be closer to Europe
However, it is all academic as Starmer and labour will win the next GE and have to deal with the chasm in expectations as they either have to freeze public sector spending or come up with billions and billions of new taxes
Frankly, I have no faith in any of our politicians to resolve the countries problems as the remedies are simply politically unacceptable
The more earth salting this Government can exact on the next, ensures the next Government fail quickly. The only fly in the ointment is what if by some quirk of fate the Tories sneak home first. Oops!
Some hyperbole in there, but also the sense that Kyiv has run out of road. The only way it can win now is by super weapons aimed at Russia directly. America, Britain and Germany won’t supply those = WW3
Russia is similarly exhausted, so it will end up as a frozen war like Korea
The US are probably going to have to engineer regime change as Zelensky looks like he's intent on going down with the ship. Maybe Zaluzhny who will faithfully push the Pentagon's line at all times.
I feel sorry for Zekensky. A genuinely inspiring leader but the brutal facts of war are now against him
Over the winter the Russians will renew their hideous pounding of Ukrainian cities and infra. Grinding away the will to fight
And then, come the spring? What can Zelenskyy do? He hasn’t the troops to force any kind of new offensive and victory, Russia is still entrenched behind six billion landmines. It’s a tragic stalemate
There is a lot more room for manoeuvre and progress east of the Dnipro river than there is further east. There are logistical challenges of getting enough equipment and men over a river a km wide in places but the Ukrainians are driving the Russians back far enough to make a pontoon safe from artillery.
What the last several months have shown is that the modern hi-tech western armour has not been anything like the breakthrough or game changer that was hoped. Attacking remains way more difficult than defending as the Russians are finding at Adiivka and the armour simply has not changed that.
Yes. That is the lesson. Modern technology allows drones and robots to lay mines at such an astounding rate - thousands a minute - no attacking force can get through
“Chinese strategists have followed these discussions closely, of course, and are particularly attuned to the major role that landmines have played in the Ukraine War. That conflict increasingly shows signs of becoming a stalemate, as defensive technologies, such as man-portable air defense and anti-tank systems have demonstrated their value. A mid-2023 detailed Chinese-language survey of landmine warfare in the Ukraine War yields the conclusion that mines have played the most important role in stymieing the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The article states, “Landmines…as everyone knows, are easy to sow, but hard to remove.””
“On a top floor of Kyiv's Cabinet of Ministers building, Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and two advisers huddle around a laptop. A map of the country is on the screen, overlaid with a honeycomb pattern of hexagonal tiles, ranging from pale yellow to blood red. As the group types questions into a chatbot, filtering for areas close to schools or power lines, the model zooms into the satellite imagery until a field with individual trees becomes visible. A red bubble with an exclamation point marks a suspected landmine. A staffer clicks a button, creating a request to dispatch a demining team to clear it.”
Multiply that by millions. If you need a full demining *team* to clear *one* mine then you are totally fucked. This is not a serious approach. If they are really doing this then they have lost.
Yes, it’s quite forlorn
Russia has laid MILLIONS of mines and experts say it can literally lay 1000s every hour, far faster than they can be cleared
How do you get round that? I guess paratroop over them, attack from the Black Sea…. But these are pipe dreams
You don't have to.
What's needed is to destroy the Russian military until it is reduced to a light infantry force.
Something which the Russians are helping with by launching pointless attacks of their own.
There's a very fine balancing act going on. The Americans are playing the Russian mentality against the Russians quite brilliantly. Russia never gets taken to the point where it has to acknowledge it needs to go home; but also, it never gets to the point where it can safely absorb Ukraine - or even parts of it - into a Greater Russia. All the while, it is beng bled.
The Russians don't THINK they are losing to Ukraine. But the Yanks know that Moscow's machismo requires it to re-acquire territory lost. Whatever the cost. So their meat-waves go and regain bits of Bakhmut or wherever, the few survivors reporting to Putin that they are back where they were six months ago. But what they never report is that their current capability to wage another war outside its borders is non-existent. Their soldiers who used to undertake training are all long dead. Those now doing the job may have a few weeks at the front. They survived - so they get to teach how they survived. But they were simply lucky. You don't get to teach luck.
Their best kit has gone too. T-90 tanks are as flimsy as anything else that has trundled into Ukraine. Their much vaunted prototypes are also rusting hulks amongst the sunflowers. The 2-million dollar a pop Terminator - sold by Putin as a game-changer - gets wiped out by a thousand-buck drone. International sales of Russian military kit will plummet - partly because it is being shown to be shit, but also because your average tin-pot dictator can have no idea when it will be delivered. One reason for Russian to want to freeze the conflict is so that it can try and build some stock to meet existing orders that have instead been sent to Ukraine.
Russian troops have another horrible winter in Ukraine. At some point, the nightmare of cluster munitions will be replaced by F-16s lobbing thousand and fifteen hundred pound bombs into their less than adequate shelters.
At that point, America may have decided it is time for Russia to lose.
Until last November there was a third weapon in our fiscal armoury: borrowing. Interest rates were dead cheap and the UK remained less leveraged than many economies (we still are).
Then because of global inflation annd interest rate rises, accelerated by some silly domestic behaviour, debt became unaffordable as an option.
But it shouldn’t be ruled out for future investment. The zero sum game we’re in now, where we either hike taxes or let public infrastructure and services collapse further, all the time struggling to stimulate growth, is not a particularly appealing vision for the future. The thing forcing it on us is the so called fiscal rules.
Several crises have shown that government can and does spend vast amounts bailing out the country by borrowing on capital markets when it has to. Well we’re in a crisis of growth and productivity now. It’s too expensive to borrow excessively now but…if and when gilt rates come down we should look at it.
We should also look at VAT.
Borrowing only works if the return generated is higher than the cost of the borrowing.
That's not as easy thing to achieve generally.
Even more so in current years.
And especially so when UK governments are involved.
A world where inheritance was illegal and you forfeited everything to the state when you died, with each new generation having to make its own way from scratch, whilst being unachievable both in theory and practice, would actually be a much better place.
No it would be a socialist world used to fund an ever growing state and destroying the traditional family, destroying family farms, family businesses and our remaining great estates.
Which is why we traditional conservatives would fight such a vision every step of the way
An unfair thing is that someone who has a house worth, say, only £80,000 would still have to spend 75% of it on nursing care costs. This happened to someone in my family recently.
Until last November there was a third weapon in our fiscal armoury: borrowing. Interest rates were dead cheap and the UK remained less leveraged than many economies (we still are).
Then because of global inflation annd interest rate rises, accelerated by some silly domestic behaviour, debt became unaffordable as an option.
But it shouldn’t be ruled out for future investment. The zero sum game we’re in now, where we either hike taxes or let public infrastructure and services collapse further, all the time struggling to stimulate growth, is not a particularly appealing vision for the future. The thing forcing it on us is the so called fiscal rules.
Several crises have shown that government can and does spend vast amounts bailing out the country by borrowing on capital markets when it has to. Well we’re in a crisis of growth and productivity now. It’s too expensive to borrow excessively now but…if and when gilt rates come down we should look at it.
We should also look at VAT.
Borrowing only works if the return generated is higher than the cost of the borrowing.
That's not as easy thing to achieve generally.
Even more so in current years.
And especially so when UK governments are involved.
Very true, which is why we need to wait until interest rates fall. But once they’re 4% or lower any old half decent investment easily clears the hurdle.
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
Good afternoon
I am a conservative and believe IHT as it is presently is fair and should not be a priority before improving the tax allowances on income.
Then I am pleased David Cameron is back at the top table, and not concerned by immigration especially as we need the 100,000 health workers, and I would be happy to be closer to Europe
However, it is all academic as Starmer and labour will win the next GE and have to deal with the chasm in expectations as they either have to freeze public sector spending or come up with billions and billions of new taxes
Frankly, I have no faith in any of our politicians to resolve the countries problems as the remedies are simply politically unacceptable
The same chasm will still exist if Sunak wins re-election. I'm afraid this is the consequence of a prolonged period of economic cowardice from Governments of all parties.
Perhaps the truth is we have always wanted European levels of public services on American levels of taxation. I'm regularly regaled by those who claim we are heavily taxed but in comparison with Holland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy is that true? The other side of the equation starts with us asking some hard questions about what it is we want the State to do and where the priorities are or should be.
About half goes on welfare and health followed by education and then debt interest.
Individual policies can be popular, even most of a party's individual policies might be, yet still not help them be popular. That's politics for you.
Corbyn was the classic case for this. His supporters online would constantly post polling that showed majorities for his policies but the public distrust of Corbyn's competence meant it was irrelevant.
Not exactly. The right-wing press highlighted the policies, thinking they'd alienate people, and they generated a lot of real enthusiasm which produced the near-win in 2017. I don't remember ever encountering more people on the doorstep saying "I didn't vote Labour last time but I really like [policy X]". It was much more that than a reflection of the "Oh Jeremy Corbyn" rallies, which older people thought somewhere between endearing and silly. But suspicion of Corbyn and Labour generally persisted just enough for the Tories to squeak home.
Whether it's possible to have lots of exciting policies without triggering the "too much of a risk" reflex is an interesting question which Starmer has evidently decided not to try. "We will improve things gradually by incremental change too boring to read" doesn't rule out some quite interesting things (e.g. on housing and the environment) but only really works if you're running against a party that people are tired of.
I think people like left wing policies overseen by Conservatives.
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when heavy death duties and land taxes and estates duties were applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Where do you get your stats from?
If you inherit £10m you should be able to make £400k per year with relatively little risk.
That seems to be very high to *only* scrape into the top 1%
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when it was applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Which do you regard as more important - creating wealth or inheriting wealth ?
I am a conservative Tory, I believe both are important.
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
Good afternoon
I am a conservative and believe IHT as it is presently is fair and should not be a priority before improving the tax allowances on income.
Then I am pleased David Cameron is back at the top table, and not concerned by immigration especially as we need the 100,000 health workers, and I would be happy to be closer to Europe
However, it is all academic as Starmer and labour will win the next GE and have to deal with the chasm in expectations as they either have to freeze public sector spending or come up with billions and billions of new taxes
Frankly, I have no faith in any of our politicians to resolve the countries problems as the remedies are simply politically unacceptable
The same chasm will still exist if Sunak wins re-election. I'm afraid this is the consequence of a prolonged period of economic cowardice from Governments of all parties.
Perhaps the truth is we have always wanted European levels of public services on American levels of taxation. I'm regularly regaled by those who claim we are heavily taxed but in comparison with Holland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy is that true? The other side of the equation starts with us asking some hard questions about what it is we want the State to do and where the priorities are or should be.
About half goes on welfare and health followed by education and then debt interest.
Sweden of course has abolished their IHT completely
Erling Haaland becomes the fastest-ever player to hit 50 goals in the Premier League
And its not even close. 48 games vs 67 for Cole. That's Ronaldo/Messi territory.
And with far less touches of the ball than any of them....he touches the ball about as often as the matchday mascot...thats a good or bad thing is a different matter.
An unfair thing is that someone who has a house worth, say, only £80,000 would still have to spend 75% of it on nursing care costs. This happened to someone in my family recently.
Why should ordinary working people pay tax to preserve your family’s wealth?
The whole purpose of saving is to accumulate assets when you are in peak earning mode and then to run them down when you are not.
Nonsense. Presented with the choice between paying more tax when you’re dead, or more tax when you’re alive, any sensible person should choose the former.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Their children and grandchildren however would choose the latter, especially if they had a large estate.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when heavy death duties and land taxes and estates duties were applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
Where do you get your stats from?
If you inherit £10m you should be able to make £400k per year with relatively little risk.
That seems to be very high to *only* scrape into the top 1%
The top 1% earn about £150-£200k per year, so if you want to be in the top 1% your entire adult life you would need to earn that much each and every year of your adult life. That would require over £10 million spread over 50-60 years.
Yes you might be able to do it with a little less but very successful investments
If IHT is tinkered with I think the furthest the government will go is potentially increasing the primary homes allowance from £500k to £600k which would cover a pretty big increment of the blue wall oldies at £1.2m per couple and blue wall boomers who want to inherit. Reducing the headline rate or increasing the non-housing allowance seem completely out of the question.
Er, how do you make that out? The primary homes allowance or rather RNRB is 175K per person = of course 350K for a married couple (only) - tough shite if one is single or an aunt/uncle.
Edit: of course, that depends on having children.
The maximum allowance per person is 325 basic plus RNRB = 500K. But IIRC the RNRB depnds on how big the estate is. It also depnds on having a hosue worth 350K - ie if the house is worth less the allowance is not transferable to other assets. It's a huge bung to Tory'voting pensioners in the south.
Just raise the IHT threshold from £325k to £1 million for all estates
you mean make an even bigger bung to Tory voting pensioners in the south?
If IHT is tinkered with I think the furthest the government will go is potentially increasing the primary homes allowance from £500k to £600k which would cover a pretty big increment of the blue wall oldies at £1.2m per couple and blue wall boomers who want to inherit. Reducing the headline rate or increasing the non-housing allowance seem completely out of the question.
Er, how do you make that out? The primary homes allowance or rather RNRB is 175K per person = of course 350K for a married couple (only) - tough shite if one is single or an aunt/uncle.
Edit: of course, that depends on having children.
The maximum allowance per person is 325 basic plus RNRB = 500K. But IIRC the RNRB depnds on how big the estate is. It also depnds on having a hosue worth 350K - ie if the house is worth less the allowance is not transferable to other assets. It's a huge bung to Tory'voting pensioners in the south.
Just raise the IHT threshold from £325k to £1 million for all estates
you mean make an even bigger bung to Tory voting pensioners in the south?
The average UK property is now worth nearly £325k, that is far more than Tory voting pensioners in the south affected (and of course it is technically their children and grandchildren who would benefit, not them as they would be dead)
What I don't like about IHT is its intrusiveness. For example, we give monthly allowances to our grandchildren while they are studying. In order for these "gifts" not to fall foul of IHT we must show that these payments come out of regular income. And to do that we have to declare 7 years of our income and expenditure including all gifts over £200 on a detailed form with categories specified by the tax authorities. What business is this of the state?
the state that provides ambulance services should you keel over with a heart attack. fair trade imo
Comments
baking. A well outside. Priesthole. Ancient graffiti on an old oak chest. Secret tunnel to the church. Then a large Georgian extension and Victorian orangerie.
It will all come out in years to come but I understand some battles have been akin to WWI engagements, with the sort of utterly horrific figures on both sides that we thought had been consigned to the past.
What they now hold is the maximum they can hope for
I can't see a way Russia takes Odessa, absent a total Ukrainian collapse.
One possible solution might be to only tax the increase in value over general inflation since the property was last purchased.
Plus even inheriting £1 million would only enable you to lead a very average lifestyle if you never did any paid work. You would need to inherit about £2.5 million to be in the top 10% of incomes without working and you would need to inherit about
£10 million+ to be in the top 1% by annual income and the latter 2 groups would still pay IHT on most of the estate inherited even with a £1 million threshold for IHT
This is why I can’t see that an Armistice on the present lines is much of a win for Putin, His army has been chewed to pieces and his military humiliated. And all for a strip of coastline that is now devastated by war which he has to rebuild
But he might prefer this qualified gain compared to even greater losses if he tries to attack - the Russian voters certainly would
I'm sure he and his bunch of hooligans could spin that as a win if they put their minds to it.
That’s before you consider the positive effects that IHT has on making our society more meritocracy than aristocracy.
Well done Vlad. Give the man a biscuit.
What's needed is to destroy the Russian military until it is reduced to a light infantry force.
Something which the Russians are helping with by launching pointless attacks of their own.
IHT doesn't make much difference to making us more meritocratic, that is down to better education, more skilled and white collar jobs available and higher rates of home ownership.
As I pointed out earlier you would need to inherit £10 million plus to enter the top 1% by income without ever doing any paid work and those estates would still pay IHT even if you raised the threshold to £1 million.
IHT might therefore make us a bit more meritocratic if it mainly hit the super rich (and they didn't have as many exemptions) as it made a bit of difference when heavy death duties and land taxes and estates duties were applied to the great aristocratic estates by Lloyd George in the early 20th century and forced them to open their stately homes to the public and marry off their daughters to wealthy American industrialists and financiers.
That is it
And see here. Wiki says Russia has possibly lost 15,000 men killed and injured every month during this campaign, and remember Russia is defending and Ukrainian losses are likely to be just as bad if not worse, as they are attacking through gruesome minefields
Let’s say they are AS bad, that’s 5 months, at 15,000 casualties per month = 75,000. Smack bang in the middle of my prediction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ukrainian_counteroffensive
If I was a Liberal I would believe the former was most important but I am not.
If I was a Socialist, I would believe neither were important (other than as a source of tax revenue to expand the size of the state and welfare)
When there is a 'peace' (and I doubt any peace under Putin will be long-lasting), it'll be interesting to see how sanctions play into the peace. Putin will want them all lifting in response. Those calls should be resisted. A slow loosening of sanctions dependent on Russia becoming a civilised member of the international community.
Which would be a ratio of 3:1 Russian to Ukrainian - perhaps higher given the unwillingness to learn from mistakes that Russia seems to have.
Does it matter to you if the wealth of this country is increasingly in foreign possession ?
Which is an inevitable consequence of less wealth being created than consumed.
Remember we are not talking about the early stages of the war, when Russia fucked everything up, we are talking about a failed counter offensive by Ukraine
All the reports say that, unfortunately, the Russians have really upped their game, they defend with more skill than they attack. Ukraine has struggled terribly, as we see
And, anecdotally
“ABC News spoke with two former U.S. soldiers who are contracted in a special forces division of the Ukrainian military and who were both injured during an operation in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago.
Both soldiers are currently in a hospital in Kyiv but said they hope to be transferred to Germany for surgery this week in order to remove shrapnel from their bodies.
The men said their team's mission was to seize control of a village on the outskirts of Donetsk city, which has been occupied by a Russian-controlled militia since 2014.
One of the men, a former U.S. soldier from Texas who goes by the callsign "Tango," said his unit of "dozens" of men took "85% casualties" and that two of their comrades were killed when the team was ambushed whilst advancing into Russian-occupied territory. Forty percent of the unit was so badly injured they were rendered "combat ineffective," he said.”
https://abcnews.go.com/International/ukraine-taking-heavy-casualties-counteroffensive-soldiers/story?id=102347740
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/08/russia-ukraine-defense-counteroffensive/
“How Russia learned from mistakes to slow Ukraine’s counteroffensive”
Whichever side attacks gets horrifically chewed up. That is why I cannot see far beyond a frozen war roughly where we are now
Russia can’t take Odessa, Ukraine can’t regain Crimea
All very depressing. I am going to watch Masterchef. Later
I am a conservative and believe IHT as it is presently is fair and should not be a priority before improving the tax allowances on income.
Then I am pleased David Cameron is back at the top table, and not concerned by immigration especially as we need the 100,000 health workers, and I would be happy to be closer to Europe
However, it is all academic as Starmer and labour will win the next GE and have to deal with the chasm in expectations as they either have to freeze public sector spending or come up with billions and billions of new taxes
Frankly, I have no faith in any of our politicians to resolve the countries problems as the remedies are simply politically unacceptable
I find myself fairly ambivalent on IHT. I think there's an argument for raising the threshold (as has happened with income tax) but less for abolition.
The other problem I have, at a time when the Treasury needs every penny it can get and we are spending £7.5 billion a month on debt interest payments alone, is how we can afford it or, rather, how do you cover the shortfall in revenue? Every tax cut needs to be framed in the context of where the missing money is going to be found.If the response is borrowing, the problem then becomes the debt interest.
If we were running a large budget surplus, I'd happily support raising IHT thresholds but we aren't. If the only reason is to try to re-elect the Government, that makes political sense but it's fiscally incoherent.
We should be aiming to try to restore balance to the public finances but there are only two ways to achieve it, either by cutting spending or raising taxes (though sometimes both works). The Conservative profligacy needs to end and those responsible need to be held accountable.
Your underestimating how many casualties Russia is losing by needless attacks all along the front line.
And while Ukraine's attacks haven't made much progress they prompt Russian counterattacks and inflict heavy casualties on them.
Foreign ownership of many of our largest companies and some of the most expensive property in London is little to do with inherited wealth, if we had more old money families holding expensive London properties and running large family businesses it would indeed be less of an issue
The election will be announced, and the official campaign period will begin, some time between 8 and 18 December.
On 13 September at the Eastern Economic Forum, Putin said he'll say one way or the other once the said period has begun.
Somewhat different news came out on 3 October in Kommersant. They reported that Putin was likely to announce at the opening of the "Rossiya" international expo-forum (~4 November) that hell yeah, he was going to stand. He didn't.
That forum is scheduled to continue until after the March election, so perhaps he'll still do it there.
Russia is no tinderbox though.
You’re suggesting an an offensive in one quadrant doubled the total Ukrainian casualties in the war
Most likely, the government's aim is to turn a catastrophe into a mere disaster. It's easy to see why they want to do that. But doing it at substantial cost to the public good... It's not particularly patriotic.
To nick an idea from a different context, a war with no realistic chance of victory can never really be Just.
Then because of global inflation annd interest rate rises, accelerated by some silly domestic behaviour, debt became unaffordable as an option.
But it shouldn’t be ruled out for future investment. The zero sum game we’re in now, where we either hike taxes or let public infrastructure and services collapse further, all the time struggling to stimulate growth, is not a particularly appealing vision for the future. The thing forcing it on us is the so called fiscal rules.
Several crises have shown that government can and does spend vast amounts bailing out the country by borrowing on capital markets when it has to. Well we’re in a crisis of growth and productivity now. It’s too expensive to borrow excessively now but…if and when gilt rates come down we should look at it.
We should also look at VAT.
But it had still lost.
Sometimes land is taken before armies are defeated and sometimes it happens afterwards.
Sometimes things happen quickly, sometimes slowly and sometimes slowly then quickly.
You have a team that works a location. Some in supporting roles some clearing mines.
The reality is they are identifying and prioritising minefields.
The guff about sending a request for a single mine is just that.
The Russians don't THINK they are losing to Ukraine. But the Yanks know that Moscow's machismo requires it to re-acquire territory lost. Whatever the cost. So their meat-waves go and regain bits of Bakhmut or wherever, the few survivors reporting to Putin that they are back where they were six months ago. But what they never report is that their current capability to wage another war outside its borders is non-existent. Their soldiers who used to undertake training are all long dead. Those now doing the job may have a few weeks at the front. They survived - so they get to teach how they survived. But they were simply lucky. You don't get to teach luck.
Their best kit has gone too. T-90 tanks are as flimsy as anything else that has trundled into Ukraine. Their much vaunted prototypes are also rusting hulks amongst the sunflowers. The 2-million dollar a pop Terminator - sold by Putin as a game-changer - gets wiped out by a thousand-buck drone. International sales of Russian military kit will plummet - partly because it is being shown to be shit, but also because your average tin-pot dictator can have no idea when it will be delivered. One reason for Russian to want to freeze the conflict is so that it can try and build some stock to meet existing orders that have instead been sent to Ukraine.
Russian troops have another horrible winter in Ukraine. At some point, the nightmare of cluster munitions will be replaced by F-16s lobbing thousand and fifteen hundred pound bombs into their less than adequate shelters.
At that point, America may have decided it is time for Russia to lose.
That's not as easy thing to achieve generally.
Even more so in current years.
And especially so when UK governments are involved.
Which is why we traditional conservatives would fight such a vision every step of the way
This is Ukraine's fight. They have been invaded. And it is our moral duty to support them as long as they wish to continue.
Anything else is bullshit.
Perhaps the truth is we have always wanted European levels of public services on American levels of taxation. I'm regularly regaled by those who claim we are heavily taxed but in comparison with Holland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy is that true? The other side of the equation starts with us asking some hard questions about what it is we want the State to do and where the priorities are or should be.
About half goes on welfare and health followed by education and then debt interest.
If you inherit £10m you should be able to make £400k per year with relatively little risk.
That seems to be very high to *only* scrape into the top 1%
Still wins 0.83 non pen goals per game to 0.75
The whole purpose of saving is to accumulate assets when you are in peak earning mode and then to run them down when you are not.
Yes you might be able to do it with a little less but very successful investments