This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
This one's for @Leon , who told us the "ONLY REASON" Biden didn't get charged was because he's senile.
If you can't be bothered reading the several hundred pages of the report, this article is probably the next best thing. Recommended read.
https://www.justsecurity.org/92090/the-real-robert-hur-report-versus-what-you-read-in-the-news/ The Special Counsel Robert Hur report has been grossly mischaracterized by the press. The report finds that the evidence of a knowing, willful violation of the criminal laws is wanting. Indeed, the report, on page 6, notes that there are “innocent explanations” that Hur “cannot refute.” That is but one of myriad examples we outline in great detail below of the report repeatedly finding a lack of proof. And those findings mean, in DOJ-speak, there is simply no case. Unrefuted innocent explanations is the sine qua non of not just a case that does not meet the standard for criminal prosecution – it means innocence. Or as former Attorney General Bill Barr and his former boss would have put it, a total vindication..
Even so, the fact it is A reason is surely enough to make him unfit to be President.
It’s not a reason, though. There would be no charges if Biden were in his prime and sharper than you.
That Biden’s age and infirmity might jeopardise his candidacy is a quite separate matter. And shouldn’t have been the subject of the report in the way it was.
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
Record immigration, and record numbers inactive, yet business wants yet more foreign workers.
I don’t know the nature of the 900,000 vacancies - are these in low pay long hours jobs or something else?
Since the 1950s we have had to bring in foreign labour to do many of the jobs British people won’t do for the money business wants or can afford to pay.
It's a mixture. 58% of new GP trainees this year are qualified overseas.
Rosendale says he still loves Trump, despite endorsement of opponent https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4460734-rosendale-says-he-still-loves-trump-despite-endorsement-of-opponent/ Matt Rosendale said he still loves former President Trump despite Trump’s recent endorsement of Tim Sheehy, an opponent of the Montana Republican Senate candidate. “I love President Trump,” Rosendale said in an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip highlighted by Mediaite after Trump endorsed Sheehy. “He did an incredible job when he was the president, and he’s going to come back and do an incredible job next year when he takes the Oval Office, and I plan to be in the United States Senate next year to help him get that agenda through.”..
Just popped onto the site to say that Scotland were robbed. If the officials couldn't see that the ball was grounded... they should be sacked. They copped out of making the decision they should have made.
As for England beating Wales 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
1. Election May 2nd.
2. When parliament closes 26th March, remember anything above 3% Reform on the campaign polls you must subtract and add to the Tory score, for the two parties eventual PV.
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
The notion that your typical twenty something struggling with, variously, enormous rents, a large student debt burden and modest wages can rustle up a socking great slab of money for a pension just by giving up a few goodies - even if they can afford the goodies as it is - is laughable. Plenty will put away small sums after enrolling in occupational schemes, and anything is better than nothing, but not necessarily by much. The pension is also likely to be the first thing that gets binned when it comes to desperately trying to save for a huge house deposit or pay astronomical child care costs.
I know that parroting the fantasies of Daily Telegraph columnists kind of comes with the territory when you support the Government, but it isn't convincing anyone else.
@Sean_F was musing yesterday about whether the US doesn’t have many of the same issues as the UK.
In part. From John Murdoch in the FT - We tend to talk about the decline in young adults’ home ownership as if it were a universal phenomenon. This is wrong. The share of 25-34-year-olds who own their home in the US is 6 percentage points lower today than it was in 1990. In Germany it’s down 8 points, in France just 3, but in Britain the drop is 22 points.
The shape of that graph almost exactly mirrors the increase in net immigration.
It is immigration that has shafted young people in Britain.
Bollocks.
What is screwing them is their taxes being used to feather the nests of retirees.
That's ridiculous. If you cut income tax by 2% to reduce pensions it wouldn't change the structural dynamics at all.
Shall I tell you what's fucking the world over?
The death of nuance. The lack of awareness that things are complicated. And things very, very rarely have single causes.
Immigration is undoubtedly a factor in the drop in the rate of UK home ownership. Anyone saying otherwise is an idiot. But it is far from the only cause: if it is was the sole cause, then house prices would have risen much faster in the post-2006 period than in the twenty years before.
Here's two blindingly obvious factors that have played a role:
(1) Stamp duty preventing older people from trading down. Britain has an epidemic of homes that are too big for people. But - once stamp duty is taken into account - it's very rarely worth someone whose kids have left home downsizing. The number of homes in Britain with empty rooms is at a record, even as the housing shortage has gotten worse.
(2) Building regulations and raw material costs have made the cost of new builds dramatically higher. It costs - in real terms - more than twice as much to build a home today than it did in the early 2000s.
Point 2 is only a factor because of immigration. Without an increase in the population, we wouldn't need to expand the housing stock and new builds wouldn't need to be 'affordable' because enough of the existing houses already would be.
That's simply not true.
Go look at the ONS statistics on housing. Go back to when house prices were 3x incomes in the late 1970s. At that time, almost no homes had single unmarried people who weren't pensioners. People went straight from the parental home into marriage.
Now look at 2020. Around a fifth of the housing stock is single people below the age of 60. People now move into their own place before getting married. That's a massive increase in housing demand that's happened, even without a single person coming into the country.
Divorce has had a similar impact: when couples split, they both get their own places, and they both need space for the kids. Again: more demand for housing without a single person entering the country.
Now, as I said, immigration is clearly a factor. But it is far from the only factor. Hence the fact that Italy has had positive net migration rates since 2000, and yet house prices have actually fallen.
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
Record immigration, and record numbers inactive, yet business wants yet more foreign workers.
I don’t know the nature of the 900,000 vacancies - are these in low pay long hours jobs or something else?
Since the 1950s we have had to bring in foreign labour to do many of the jobs British people won’t do for the money business wants or can afford to pay.
And which Party has been in power the most since the early 50’s? We know now which UK political party is most friendly to immigration, even without looking at the very latest figures - 14 years into their rule with one Brexit vote less than half way through.
Rosendale says he still loves Trump, despite endorsement of opponent https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4460734-rosendale-says-he-still-loves-trump-despite-endorsement-of-opponent/ Matt Rosendale said he still loves former President Trump despite Trump’s recent endorsement of Tim Sheehy, an opponent of the Montana Republican Senate candidate. “I love President Trump,” Rosendale said in an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip highlighted by Mediaite after Trump endorsed Sheehy. “He did an incredible job when he was the president, and he’s going to come back and do an incredible job next year when he takes the Oval Office, and I plan to be in the United States Senate next year to help him get that agenda through.”..
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
The notion that your typical twenty something struggling with, variously, enormous rents, a large student debt burden and modest wages can rustle up a socking great slab of money for a pension just by giving up a few goodies - even if they can afford the goodies as it is - is laughable. Plenty will put away small sums after enrolling in occupational schemes, and anything is better than nothing, but not necessarily by much. The pension is also likely to be the first thing that gets binned when it comes to desperately trying to save for a huge house deposit or pay astronomical child care costs.
I know that parroting the fantasies of Daily Telegraph columnists kind of comes with the territory when you support the Government, but it isn't convincing anyone else.
The next Big Crunch will be Generation Rent trying to work out how to quit work and afford to live.
Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley · 51m · Michael is deployed serving our country, something you know nothing about. Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief.
Based on that clip, Trump can still conjur up the same energy he brought to his 2015/2016 rallies. You can't say the same about Biden.
That energy being the unabashed racism of pointing at someone and noting they have a foreign-sounding middle name, and then making up a nonsense conspiracy theory?
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
1. Election May 2nd.
2. When parliament closes 26th March, remember anything above 3% Reform on the campaign polls you must subtract and add to the Tory score, for the two parties eventual PV.
When you could put off the election for 6 months and you’re 20 points behind in the polls, why call an election? The financial situation will probably look better later in the year as we move away from peak inflation.
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
Record immigration, and record numbers inactive, yet business wants yet more foreign workers.
Because of the gap between what the jobs pay and what people will accept.
Is that why 58% of new GP Trainees are immigrants?
Possibly.
Or limitations in the numbers allowed to do medical degrees?
Incidentally, the Pharaohs seem to have built their pyramids with paid employment. They massively taxed the peasants, then used the money to pay them in the non-farming season to build pyramids. Maybe they had to get Red Sea Pedestrians in to do the work Egyptians wouldn't do?
Dominic Penna @DominicPenna 🚨 Wellingborough focus group spells big trouble for the Tories on Thursday
> All voted Tory in 2019 — but won’t again > Sunak “financially on another planet”and panel preferred Boris Johnson > Anger over PMQs trans jibe & Bone’s girlfriend as candidate
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
1. Election May 2nd.
2. When parliament closes 26th March, remember anything above 3% Reform on the campaign polls you must subtract and add to the Tory score, for the two parties eventual PV.
Dominic Penna @DominicPenna 🚨 Wellingborough focus group spells big trouble for the Tories on Thursday
> All voted Tory in 2019 — but won’t again > Sunak “financially on another planet”and panel preferred Boris Johnson > Anger over PMQs trans jibe & Bone’s girlfriend as candidate
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
The notion that your typical twenty something struggling with, variously, enormous rents, a large student debt burden and modest wages can rustle up a socking great slab of money for a pension just by giving up a few goodies - even if they can afford the goodies as it is - is laughable. Plenty will put away small sums after enrolling in occupational schemes, and anything is better than nothing, but not necessarily by much. The pension is also likely to be the first thing that gets binned when it comes to desperately trying to save for a huge house deposit or pay astronomical child care costs.
I know that parroting the fantasies of Daily Telegraph columnists kind of comes with the territory when you support the Government, but it isn't convincing anyone else.
The next Big Crunch will be Generation Rent trying to work out how to quit work and afford to live.
Retiring to anywhere cheap will be the only way.
A while back I was chatting to some Young People. And the idea of getting out of the rent-trap and owing a place of their own was just... unfathomable to them. Like... wasn't even on their long-term radar.
Based on that clip, Trump can still conjur up the same energy he brought to his 2015/2016 rallies. You can't say the same about Biden.
That energy being the unabashed racism of pointing at someone and noting they have a foreign-sounding middle name, and then making up a nonsense conspiracy theory?
It's not nonsense to speculate that Biden must be unusually reliant on his entourage.
I myself refuse to sell my UK property in large part because stamp duty makes the cost of buying *back* into the market extortionate.
It must be a massive block on downsizing, as @rcs1000 and indeed free movement of labour.
Reduce stamp duty; increase land value taxation. That will incentivise downsizing.
Forcing people out of their homes against their will?
Making it easier for people to move if they want to, and taxing wealth appropriately.
Its not wealth. It is a fixed asset which people have already paid for in full. If you want to use it as a tax cow then do so when the property changes hands. Make house sales liable to capital gains tax. That is fair and will deal with the issue of unearnd increases in value.
But until such times as people choose to move they should not be forced out because they can't afford to pay the tax on their own home.
Outrage after Labour by-election candidate claims Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the 'green light' to invade Gaza
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
Actually I only see 5/2 now on oddschecker. I'm not an expert.
There's not much liquidity in the market, so you have to look at last price matched. On Betfair that was 5.3 or about 9/2. I'm surprised it's that short though.
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
Do Americans still think they “ live in the greatest country on earth “ .
The best thing about the USA is it’s a reminder to us in more civilized Europe to appreciate how lucky we are !
Sadly the USA is fast turning into the “ richest third world country “ on earth !
@Sean_F was musing yesterday about whether the US doesn’t have many of the same issues as the UK.
In part. From John Murdoch in the FT - We tend to talk about the decline in young adults’ home ownership as if it were a universal phenomenon. This is wrong. The share of 25-34-year-olds who own their home in the US is 6 percentage points lower today than it was in 1990. In Germany it’s down 8 points, in France just 3, but in Britain the drop is 22 points.
The shape of that graph almost exactly mirrors the increase in net immigration.
It is immigration that has shafted young people in Britain.
Bollocks.
What is screwing them is their taxes being used to feather the nests of retirees.
That's ridiculous. If you cut income tax by 2% to reduce pensions it wouldn't change the structural dynamics at all.
Shall I tell you what's fucking the world over?
The death of nuance. The lack of awareness that things are complicated. And things very, very rarely have single causes.
Immigration is undoubtedly a factor in the drop in the rate of UK home ownership. Anyone saying otherwise is an idiot. But it is far from the only cause: if it is was the sole cause, then house prices would have risen much faster in the post-2006 period than in the twenty years before.
Here's two blindingly obvious factors that have played a role:
(1) Stamp duty preventing older people from trading down. Britain has an epidemic of homes that are too big for people. But - once stamp duty is taken into account - it's very rarely worth someone whose kids have left home downsizing. The number of homes in Britain with empty rooms is at a record, even as the housing shortage has gotten worse.
(2) Building regulations and raw material costs have made the cost of new builds dramatically higher. It costs - in real terms - more than twice as much to build a home today than it did in the early 2000s.
Point 2 is only a factor because of immigration. Without an increase in the population, we wouldn't need to expand the housing stock and new builds wouldn't need to be 'affordable' because enough of the existing houses already would be.
That's simply not true.
Go look at the ONS statistics on housing. Go back to when house prices were 3x incomes in the late 1970s. At that time, almost no homes had single unmarried people who weren't pensioners. People went straight from the parental home into marriage.
Now look at 2020. Around a fifth of the housing stock is single people below the age of 60. People now move into their own place before getting married. That's a massive increase in housing demand that's happened, even without a single person coming into the country.
Divorce has had a similar impact: when couples split, they both get their own places, and they both need space for the kids. Again: more demand for housing without a single person entering the country.
Now, as I said, immigration is clearly a factor. But it is far from the only factor. Hence the fact that Italy has had positive net migration rates since 2000, and yet house prices have actually fallen.
This is why building thousands of three-bed homes is grossly inefficient. My parents, between them, have enough room for 6 - 12 adults.
Outrage after Labour by-election candidate claims Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the 'green light' to invade Gaza
@Sean_F was musing yesterday about whether the US doesn’t have many of the same issues as the UK.
In part. From John Murdoch in the FT - We tend to talk about the decline in young adults’ home ownership as if it were a universal phenomenon. This is wrong. The share of 25-34-year-olds who own their home in the US is 6 percentage points lower today than it was in 1990. In Germany it’s down 8 points, in France just 3, but in Britain the drop is 22 points.
The shape of that graph almost exactly mirrors the increase in net immigration.
It is immigration that has shafted young people in Britain.
Bollocks.
What is screwing them is their taxes being used to feather the nests of retirees.
That's ridiculous. If you cut income tax by 2% to reduce pensions it wouldn't change the structural dynamics at all.
Shall I tell you what's fucking the world over?
The death of nuance. The lack of awareness that things are complicated. And things very, very rarely have single causes.
Immigration is undoubtedly a factor in the drop in the rate of UK home ownership. Anyone saying otherwise is an idiot. But it is far from the only cause: if it is was the sole cause, then house prices would have risen much faster in the post-2006 period than in the twenty years before.
Here's two blindingly obvious factors that have played a role:
(1) Stamp duty preventing older people from trading down. Britain has an epidemic of homes that are too big for people. But - once stamp duty is taken into account - it's very rarely worth someone whose kids have left home downsizing. The number of homes in Britain with empty rooms is at a record, even as the housing shortage has gotten worse.
(2) Building regulations and raw material costs have made the cost of new builds dramatically higher. It costs - in real terms - more than twice as much to build a home today than it did in the early 2000s.
Point 2 is only a factor because of immigration. Without an increase in the population, we wouldn't need to expand the housing stock and new builds wouldn't need to be 'affordable' because enough of the existing houses already would be.
That's simply not true.
Go look at the ONS statistics on housing. Go back to when house prices were 3x incomes in the late 1970s. At that time, almost no homes had single unmarried people who weren't pensioners. People went straight from the parental home into marriage.
Now look at 2020. Around a fifth of the housing stock is single people below the age of 60. People now move into their own place before getting married. That's a massive increase in housing demand that's happened, even without a single person coming into the country.
Divorce has had a similar impact: when couples split, they both get their own places, and they both need space for the kids. Again: more demand for housing without a single person entering the country.
Now, as I said, immigration is clearly a factor. But it is far from the only factor. Hence the fact that Italy has had positive net migration rates since 2000, and yet house prices have actually fallen.
Yes, we need to encourage lifelong marriage again too, ideally with more getting married in their 20s, not just cut immigration and build more new homes and flats to resolve the housing problem. Earlier marriages and more living in family homes earlier would also increase our declining birthrate
Outrage after Labour by-election candidate claims Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the 'green light' to invade Gaza
Outrage after Labour by-election candidate claims Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the 'green light' to invade Gaza
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
The notion that your typical twenty something struggling with, variously, enormous rents, a large student debt burden and modest wages can rustle up a socking great slab of money for a pension just by giving up a few goodies - even if they can afford the goodies as it is - is laughable. Plenty will put away small sums after enrolling in occupational schemes, and anything is better than nothing, but not necessarily by much. The pension is also likely to be the first thing that gets binned when it comes to desperately trying to save for a huge house deposit or pay astronomical child care costs.
I know that parroting the fantasies of Daily Telegraph columnists kind of comes with the territory when you support the Government, but it isn't convincing anyone else.
If fewer went to university, which beyond the top 10% academically headed for the law and medicine etc really adds little in terms of overall lifetime earnings but adds a lot in terms of student debt that would also reduce finance pressures. They could also start paid work earlier and used the money saved in student debt repayments and put it into a pension.
More support for stay at home mothers would also reduce the need for large childcare costs
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
Actually I only see 5/2 now on oddschecker. I'm not an expert.
There's not much liquidity in the market, so you have to look at last price matched. On Betfair that was 5.3 or about 9/2. I'm surprised it's that short though.
Lot of cat-lovers in Rochdale?
Labour likely to suspend their candidate lump on Galloway
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
Earlier today, I was reading a 1965 job advert from Barclays Bank, aimed at school-leavers. A-levels would give a year's seniority, so they would take O-level leavers. Branch managers were paid £3,000 a year, with top branch managers on £5,000 and a £3,000 a year pension (contribution free).
So in modern parlance, a 16-year-old could at least aspire to a defined benefits, final salary pension of more than half, and at a level of a bank manager's salary.
Dominic Penna @DominicPenna 🚨 Wellingborough focus group spells big trouble for the Tories on Thursday
> All voted Tory in 2019 — but won’t again > Sunak “financially on another planet”and panel preferred Boris Johnson > Anger over PMQs trans jibe & Bone’s girlfriend as candidate
Focus groups are nifty for exploring why things might be happening, but the idea that they are a good way of measuring what is happening is for the birds.
(What were Wellingborough Conservatives thinking?)
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
That's...actually going to start a Civil War, isn't it? National Guard of state X is not allowed to invade state Y.
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
There was something the other day linking Labour's candidate to extreme Islamism but it was all very tenuous. Possibly any slashing of Galloway's odds might have been based on the outside chance of the Labour candidate dropping out.
@Sean_F was musing yesterday about whether the US doesn’t have many of the same issues as the UK.
In part. From John Murdoch in the FT - We tend to talk about the decline in young adults’ home ownership as if it were a universal phenomenon. This is wrong. The share of 25-34-year-olds who own their home in the US is 6 percentage points lower today than it was in 1990. In Germany it’s down 8 points, in France just 3, but in Britain the drop is 22 points.
The shape of that graph almost exactly mirrors the increase in net immigration.
It is immigration that has shafted young people in Britain.
Bollocks.
What is screwing them is their taxes being used to feather the nests of retirees.
That's ridiculous. If you cut income tax by 2% to reduce pensions it wouldn't change the structural dynamics at all.
Shall I tell you what's fucking the world over?
The death of nuance. The lack of awareness that things are complicated. And things very, very rarely have single causes.
Immigration is undoubtedly a factor in the drop in the rate of UK home ownership. Anyone saying otherwise is an idiot. But it is far from the only cause: if it is was the sole cause, then house prices would have risen much faster in the post-2006 period than in the twenty years before.
Here's two blindingly obvious factors that have played a role:
(1) Stamp duty preventing older people from trading down. Britain has an epidemic of homes that are too big for people. But - once stamp duty is taken into account - it's very rarely worth someone whose kids have left home downsizing. The number of homes in Britain with empty rooms is at a record, even as the housing shortage has gotten worse.
(2) Building regulations and raw material costs have made the cost of new builds dramatically higher. It costs - in real terms - more than twice as much to build a home today than it did in the early 2000s.
Point 2 is only a factor because of immigration. Without an increase in the population, we wouldn't need to expand the housing stock and new builds wouldn't need to be 'affordable' because enough of the existing houses already would be.
That's simply not true.
Go look at the ONS statistics on housing. Go back to when house prices were 3x incomes in the late 1970s. At that time, almost no homes had single unmarried people who weren't pensioners. People went straight from the parental home into marriage.
Now look at 2020. Around a fifth of the housing stock is single people below the age of 60. People now move into their own place before getting married. That's a massive increase in housing demand that's happened, even without a single person coming into the country.
Divorce has had a similar impact: when couples split, they both get their own places, and they both need space for the kids. Again: more demand for housing without a single person entering the country.
Now, as I said, immigration is clearly a factor. But it is far from the only factor. Hence the fact that Italy has had positive net migration rates since 2000, and yet house prices have actually fallen.
This is why building thousands of three-bed homes is grossly inefficient. My parents, between them, have enough room for 6 - 12 adults.
Meet demand. Build one-bed flats.
They are - any space in London that isn't actually occupied is having a tower block of shitholes added to it. Strangely, the strategy of selling these for £x00,000 is running into problems.
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
That's...actually going to start a Civil War, isn't it? National Guard of state X is not allowed to invade state Y.
But if Angry Manchild is President Angry Manchild again...
Philippe Lazzarini @UNLazzarini - UNRWA did not know what is under its headquarters in Gaza.
- UNRWA is made aware of reports through the media regarding a tunnel under the UNRWA Headquarters in Gaza.
- UNRWA staff left its headquarters in Gaza City on 12 October following the Israeli evacuation orders and as bombardment intensified in the area.
- We have not used that compound since we left it nor are we aware of any activity that may have taken place there.
- We understand, through media reporting, that the Israeli Army has deployed troops within the UNRWA Headquarters in Gaza City.
- We are therefore unable to confirm or otherwise comment on these reports.
- In times of “no active conflict” UNRWA inspects inside its premises every quarter, the last inspection for the UNRWA Gaza premises was completed in September 2023.
- UNRWA is a Human development and humanitarian organisation that does not have the military and security expertise nor the capacity to undertake military inspections of what is or might be under its premises.
- In the past, whenever suspicious cavity was found close to or under UNRWA premises, protest letters were promptly filed to parties to the conflict, including both the de facto authorities in Gaza (Hamas) and the Israeli authorities. The matter was consistently reported in annual reports presented to the General Assembly and made public.
- These recent media reports merit an independent inquiry that is currently not possible to undertake given Gaza is an active war zone.
- The Israeli Authorities have not informed - UNRWA officially about the alleged tunnel.
Dominic Penna @DominicPenna 🚨 Wellingborough focus group spells big trouble for the Tories on Thursday
> All voted Tory in 2019 — but won’t again > Sunak “financially on another planet”and panel preferred Boris Johnson > Anger over PMQs trans jibe & Bone’s girlfriend as candidate
This feels, to me, not just a reaction to stagnant wages, but also a reflection of the extremely high rates of migration we’ve seen over past generation - a trend that to date has only escalated at a rate unseen outside of civil wars and dismemberment of Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure Labour are ideologically prepared: the policy elites and the membership at large are still stuck in the noughties.
I've been saying this for ages (if not as long as @isam). Sooner rather than later the west is going to abandon the UN Convention on Refugees. It will be absolutely hilarious if this happens whilst Labour is in power.
A few countries should get together and coalesce around a sensible set of derogations, and just declare it done. The predictable outrage would then be much weakened.
Wouldn't do that much to UK migration stats though, would it?
That's largely driven by trying to keep the UK in the style to which it has become accustomed.
More like, keeping a certain fraction of the population in the style to which it has become accustomed. Life is already pretty shite for many of our fellow citizens. Mass immigration is primarily about supporting the lifestyles of the haves and continuing to ignore the plight of the have nots.
Thankfully for Keir, the have-nots will keep voting Labour regardless. For now at least.
Yes, but in declining numbers. I reckon that the disparity in turnout between older and younger voters will increase at the next election. In the long run this, combined with the gradual increase in age profile of the electorate overall, favours the Conservatives. I think that Labour will fail in Government and the Tories won't struggle to find the votes to get back in again in 2029 or whenever.
Of course, in the very long term growing numbers of people reaching old age still stuck renting, and forced to work until they drop dead because their housing costs are astronomical and their crap money purchase private pensions are near worthless, will work against the Conservatives. But today's Tory politicians care about the next election, not about what happens to their party in thirty years' time.
Even now by 40 more own property with or without a mortgage than rent, while more pensioners own property than did in the 1990s. So we are still some way from that scenario. More at least will have some extra income in retirement through workplace pensions than just relying on the state pension
A lot of renters are rescued by wealth transfer from older relatives (through gifts and inheritances) but you can't actively grow the middle class just through the transmission of inherited wealth. Younger people without access to such resources will struggle unless they are very well paid, and their numbers will continue to grow. There's also a very real issue of people scrambling onto the property ladder in middle age, and being saddled with huge debts on overpriced homes that they'll still be paying into old age. At best they'll be forced to keep working until the debts are paid, at worst ill health will catch up with them and prevent them from working and then they'll be unable to service the mortgage.
Crap pensions are also going to have a real political impact looking forward another ten or twenty years. The current prosperity of the pensioner population (and yes, I appreciate that a minority of pensioners still really struggle, but the average pensioner is wealthier than the average worker after adjustment for housing costs,) is based on good occupational pension entitlements as well as outright home ownership. Defined benefit pensions, however, are now practically a thing of the past, and modern schemes that rely on gambling money on the stock market require enormous contributions to ensure the likelihood of satisfactory returns in retirement. Even that fraction of younger workers who can afford to put away a reasonable proportion of their income towards a pension is going to be in for a very nasty shock when they get old enough to start thinking about retirement and discover that they can barely afford the necessities if they dare to stop working. These are not conditions conducive to a content electorate.
There is nothing to stop people putting more into their pension if they are younger than the minimum to help improve retirement prospects and sacrifice some holidays, meals out, cinema trips etc in the process
The notion that your typical twenty something struggling with, variously, enormous rents, a large student debt burden and modest wages can rustle up a socking great slab of money for a pension just by giving up a few goodies - even if they can afford the goodies as it is - is laughable. Plenty will put away small sums after enrolling in occupational schemes, and anything is better than nothing, but not necessarily by much. The pension is also likely to be the first thing that gets binned when it comes to desperately trying to save for a huge house deposit or pay astronomical child care costs.
I know that parroting the fantasies of Daily Telegraph columnists kind of comes with the territory when you support the Government, but it isn't convincing anyone else.
The next Big Crunch will be Generation Rent trying to work out how to quit work and afford to live.
Retiring to anywhere cheap will be the only way.
A while back I was chatting to some Young People. And the idea of getting out of the rent-trap and owing a place of their own was just... unfathomable to them. Like... wasn't even on their long-term radar.
The grads in the bank talk about it in the way that some people talk about buying 100m yachts.
Philippe Lazzarini @UNLazzarini - UNRWA did not know what is under its headquarters in Gaza.
- UNRWA is made aware of reports through the media regarding a tunnel under the UNRWA Headquarters in Gaza.
- UNRWA staff left its headquarters in Gaza City on 12 October following the Israeli evacuation orders and as bombardment intensified in the area.
- We have not used that compound since we left it nor are we aware of any activity that may have taken place there.
- We understand, through media reporting, that the Israeli Army has deployed troops within the UNRWA Headquarters in Gaza City.
- We are therefore unable to confirm or otherwise comment on these reports.
- In times of “no active conflict” UNRWA inspects inside its premises every quarter, the last inspection for the UNRWA Gaza premises was completed in September 2023.
- UNRWA is a Human development and humanitarian organisation that does not have the military and security expertise nor the capacity to undertake military inspections of what is or might be under its premises.
- In the past, whenever suspicious cavity was found close to or under UNRWA premises, protest letters were promptly filed to parties to the conflict, including both the de facto authorities in Gaza (Hamas) and the Israeli authorities. The matter was consistently reported in annual reports presented to the General Assembly and made public.
- These recent media reports merit an independent inquiry that is currently not possible to undertake given Gaza is an active war zone.
- The Israeli Authorities have not informed - UNRWA officially about the alleged tunnel.
The butler tells me there was a terrible infestation of terrorists in the third lowest wine cellar, last year. Had to get the junior gardeners friend in, the one the *badgers* are afraid of. Not quite sure what he did, but there was some funny looking stuff on some of the bottles in the servants pantry for a while. Mustard of some kind, I believe.
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
There was something the other day linking Labour's candidate to extreme Islamism but it was all very tenuous. Possibly any slashing of Galloway's odds might have been based on the outside chance of the Labour candidate dropping out.
It’s not tenuous anymore
It’s just struck me that, if multiculturalism had worked, we wouldn’t always see Muslim candidates from the major parties in Muslim areas. Actually, it hasn’t just struck me; it’s what Enoch Powell predicted in a speech called ‘The Road To National Suicide”
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
There was something the other day linking Labour's candidate to extreme Islamism but it was all very tenuous. Possibly any slashing of Galloway's odds might have been based on the outside chance of the Labour candidate dropping out.
There's also this...
Guy Otten's name will appear on the ballot paper, but soon after the campaign began the Green Party said he would be stepping down over previously criticising Palestinians and the Islamic religion.
A Green Party spokesperson said: "The Rochdale Green Party candidate has said that he has 'decided to leave the stage' following social media posts made some years ago. As nominations have now closed, his name will still appear on the ballot. However, he will not take part in any campaigning between now and polling day.
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
There was something the other day linking Labour's candidate to extreme Islamism but it was all very tenuous. Possibly any slashing of Galloway's odds might have been based on the outside chance of the Labour candidate dropping out.
Or someone has decided to put a substantial bet on Galloway in the hope of building up his chances by slashing his odds, given I wouldn't have thought many would be betting on that particular market.
I see Galloway's odds in Rochdale have been slashed to something like 2/1 or 5/2.
I'm seeing 4/1 on Betfair. What are you looking at?
There was something the other day linking Labour's candidate to extreme Islamism but it was all very tenuous. Possibly any slashing of Galloway's odds might have been based on the outside chance of the Labour candidate dropping out.
It’s not tenuous anymore
It’s just struck me that, if multiculturalism had worked, we wouldn’t always see Muslim candidates from the major parties in Muslim areas. Actually, it hasn’t just struck me; it’s what Enoch Powell predicted in a speech called ‘The Road To National Suicide”
Well, firstly, we don't always. For instance, LB Redbridge is 1/3 Muslim but Ilford North and South have Wes Streeting and Sam Tarry respectively, and Tarry is replaced as Labour candidate and almost certainly MP at the next election by Jas Athwal, who is a Sikh. Secondly, if there are lots of any sort in an area, you'd expect the same in the local constituency party, from where they'd pop up naturally as candidates.
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
That's...actually going to start a Civil War, isn't it? National Guard of state X is not allowed to invade state Y.
Either Trump is lying on a grand scale about non existent plans to deport ten million people, or he intends to put large parts of the country under something like martial law.
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
That's...actually going to start a Civil War, isn't it? National Guard of state X is not allowed to invade state Y.
Either Trump is lying on a grand scale about non existent plans to deport ten million people, or he intends to put large parts of the country under something like martial law.
The US military, and its adherence to the constitution and, to basic sanity, could be the world's only hope frankly.
MarkHertling @MarkHertling · 1h First, it’s not likely that any President of any European country said this. Because there’s no “paying” to anyone involved.
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
That's...actually going to start a Civil War, isn't it? National Guard of state X is not allowed to invade state Y.
Either Trump is lying on a grand scale about non existent plans to deport ten million people, or he intends to put large parts of the country under something like martial law.
I must confess I thought Opinium would be better for the Conservatives but Starmer’s backtracking on Green environments was only going to cost him votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens while after what only @Mexicanpete seems to think has been a good week for Sunak the Conservatives remain below 30% and occasionally even below 25%.
I am also told by @MoonRabbit the election will be on May 2nd after what presumably will be a “jam today, more jam tomorrow if you vote the right way” budget. I’m not convinced.
Is the coming election going to be about immigration? It will simmer below the surface I’m certain but is Richard Tice Britain’s answer to Geert Wilders? Seems unlikely - I don’t even know what Reform’s immigration policy is let alone whether they would advocate something akin to Wilders.
The truth is immigration bumps up against the fact of a declining work force. As the number of indigenous workers falls where, until the coming of AI, are the replacements for those simply giving up on work? The expected response from the Right seems to be to bang on about cutting welfare - so we force pensioners back to work by cutting their pensions?
London has seen a construction boom in recent years - I’d argue the only difference with Pharaoh is at least we pay the foreign construction workers rather than enslave them.
1. Election May 2nd.
2. When parliament closes 26th March, remember anything above 3% Reform on the campaign polls you must subtract and add to the Tory score, for the two parties eventual PV.
When you could put off the election for 6 months and you’re 20 points behind in the polls, why call an election? The financial situation will probably look better later in the year as we move away from peak inflation.
May 2nd is the sweet spot before the news coming in gets worse for the government, worse in some ways with all Sunak’s Pledge's going the wrong way, its an impossible background to fight a positive campaign against.
You aware of the publication of the interim covid report this summer?
The stagnation, perhaps even technical recession of the economy, meaning growth, jobs, business closures all going the wrong way?
You aware of the growth in channel crossings this summer and autumn, partly because Europe tanked up on migrants last year meaning modelling shows UK on for something matching or exceeding worst year yet for channel crossing, and partly because the low hanging Albanian fruit was picked last year making the current status looking like it’s going in right direction, but in contrast caused by last years apparent success, by autumn the chart will show it going wrong way again.
Yes, inflation has come down, but how quickly you saying that actually works through the system to voters rewarding government? Quite the opposite, high interest rates and mortgage renewals will be costing the Tories votes all through this year.
Six months time means six months more of biggest vote loser of all, party splits and attacks on Sunak: not least anger following the May 2nd set of elections, and the increase in boat crossings.
And what will the increase in boat crossings this year do to the haemorrhage of Tory voters to Reform?
And six months comes dangerously close to another disastrous vote losing Party Conference, haunted by outgoing government vibe and illustrated by Farage and Patel dancing on Sunak’s political grave?
There’s other things not quite so certain to happen, but could happen - markets paying attention to interest paid on UKs huge debt as the government cuts tax intake and gives other giveaways. Or Biden’s desire for economic strength for his re-election campaign creates a run on other currencies around the world. Ukraine having a bad summer in the war. A Vonc triggered in Sunak’s leadership.
You made it sound so so simple, Bonde. Maybe there’s more to consider than you thought in timing election campaigns for the best result. If I was being paid a lot of money to get best possible election result for Tories this year, I would have told them months ago it’s May 2nd. 😁
The US military, and its adherence to the constitution and, to basic sanity, could be the world's only hope frankly.
MarkHertling @MarkHertling · 1h First, it’s not likely that any President of any European country said this. Because there’s no “paying” to anyone involved.
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’ The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/ … Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
That's...actually going to start a Civil War, isn't it? National Guard of state X is not allowed to invade state Y.
Either Trump is lying on a grand scale about non existent plans to deport ten million people, or he intends to put large parts of the country under something like martial law.
1. A lesson of history is to actually listen to wannabe dictators because they tell us what they will do.
2. Unbelievable hispanics are apparently switching from Biden to Trump 2.0.
"I didn't think he meant me and my cousin when he said 'deport'"
It's definitely not irrational for Hispanics to want to crackdown on illegally-immigrating Hispanics. Aside from the personal stuff (they're giving our community a bad name, I followed the rules so why shouldn't they etc) the evidence about the impact on wages and growth seems to be that immigration is good for every demographic of the existing population (low-skilled people seem to see a slightly negative short-term impact but a bigger positive long-term impact, everyone else gets positive short-term and long-term impact) *except* for other recent immigrants.
There is no easy escape from these dilemmas. But the best approach available to Biden is a distinctively old-fashioned one. He should accept the necessity of drama and bloodletting but also condense it all into the format that was originally designed for handling intraparty competition: the Democratic National Convention.
That would mean not dropping out today or tomorrow or any day when party primaries are still proceeding. Instead Biden would continue accumulating pledged delegates, continue touting the improving economic numbers, continue attacking Donald Trump — until August and the convention, when he would shock the world by announcing his withdrawal from the race, decline to issue any endorsement, and invite the convention delegates to choose his replacement.
I think the Biden delegates just choose Kamala Harris and he made it worse by not endorsing her?
I think I have a more realistic solution than Douthat. Biden should announce that as he is very old, he will nominate Kamala Harris as his representative in the traditional inter-branch Hunger Games. I haven't gamed out everything that would happen yet but I'm pretty sure that it ends with John Roberts and Speaker Mike Johnson dead and Kamala's severed head held aloft by the triumphant Senatorial tribute Amy KLOBUCHAR
Someone who was Prime Minister for six years only beating David Lammy by 3% on foreign policy isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
Lammy’s just a really interesting politician. I don’t claim to know him in the slightest, but I had a, what, 3 minute conversation with him in 2022 and came away thinking this man has some interesting but unpredictable depths.
To be honest if I had to spend a weekend at Chevening or Chequers with a couple of front benchers I wouldn’t mind it being Lammy and Cameron.
I prefer Chevening to Chequers.
Haven't been to either for quite some time ***sobs***.
@JohnO has been to Chevening more recently than me, he likes it too.
I did muchly but it's also where I caught my first dose of COVID in September 2021, so even more memorable.
I know that "Chevening" is a country house and residence of the Foreign Secretary, but day-um if the fragment "JohnO has been to Chevening more recently, he likes it too" doesn't sound really rude.
Comments
There would be no charges if Biden were in his prime and sharper than you.
That Biden’s age and infirmity might jeopardise his candidacy is a quite separate matter. And shouldn’t have been the subject of the report in the way it was.
Rosendale says he still loves Trump, despite endorsement of opponent
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4460734-rosendale-says-he-still-loves-trump-despite-endorsement-of-opponent/
Matt Rosendale said he still loves former President Trump despite Trump’s recent endorsement of Tim Sheehy, an opponent of the Montana Republican Senate candidate.
“I love President Trump,” Rosendale said in an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip highlighted by Mediaite after Trump endorsed Sheehy. “He did an incredible job when he was the president, and he’s going to come back and do an incredible job next year when he takes the Oval Office, and I plan to be in the United States Senate next year to help him get that agenda through.”..
As for England beating Wales 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
2. When parliament closes 26th March, remember anything above 3% Reform on the campaign polls you must subtract and add to the Tory score, for the two parties eventual PV.
I know that parroting the fantasies of Daily Telegraph columnists kind of comes with the territory when you support the Government, but it isn't convincing anyone else.
Go look at the ONS statistics on housing. Go back to when house prices were 3x incomes in the late 1970s. At that time, almost no homes had single unmarried people who weren't pensioners. People went straight from the parental home into marriage.
Now look at 2020. Around a fifth of the housing stock is single people below the age of 60. People now move into their own place before getting married. That's a massive increase in housing demand that's happened, even without a single person coming into the country.
Divorce has had a similar impact: when couples split, they both get their own places, and they both need space for the kids. Again: more demand for housing without a single person entering the country.
Now, as I said, immigration is clearly a factor. But it is far from the only factor. Hence the fact that Italy has had positive net migration rates since 2000, and yet house prices have actually fallen.
Ukraine is facing a shortage of air defense missiles and could exhaust its stockpiles next month, according to unnamed American officials cited by The New York Times.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1756445187134439621
Retiring to anywhere cheap will be the only way.
If we don't get a GE soon we'll continue.
It's pretty boring.
Nikki Haley
@NikkiHaley
·
51m
·
Michael is deployed serving our country, something you know nothing about. Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief.
Or limitations in the numbers allowed to do medical degrees?
Incidentally, the Pharaohs seem to have built their pyramids with paid employment. They massively taxed the peasants, then used the money to pay them in the non-farming season to build pyramids. Maybe they had to get Red Sea Pedestrians in to do the work Egyptians wouldn't do?
Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’
The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/
… Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
… How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive..
But until such times as people choose to move they should not be forced out because they can't afford to pay the tax on their own home.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13069671/Outrage-Labour-candidate-claims-Israel-deliberately-allowed-1-400-citizens-massacred-October-7-order-green-light-invade-Gaza.html
Lot of cat-lovers in Rochdale?
The best thing about the USA is it’s a reminder to us in more civilized Europe to appreciate how lucky we are !
Sadly the USA is fast turning into the “ richest third world country “ on earth !
Meet demand. Build one-bed flats.
I suppose if the candidate is suspended, & they put Paul Waugh in, GG could win by getting the Islamic vote
Will be funny to see the centrists have to defend & back him/celebrate his win. He obviously meant what he said
More support for stay at home mothers would also reduce the need for large childcare costs
So in modern parlance, a 16-year-old could at least aspire to a defined benefits, final salary pension of more than half, and at a level of a bank manager's salary.
(What were Wellingborough Conservatives thinking?)
If so, I demand a shrubbery!
The butler tells me there was a terrible infestation of terrorists in the third lowest wine cellar, last year. Had to get the junior gardeners friend in, the one the *badgers* are afraid of. Not quite sure what he did, but there was some funny looking stuff on some of the bottles in the servants pantry for a while. Mustard of some kind, I believe.
It’s just struck me that, if multiculturalism had worked, we wouldn’t always see Muslim candidates from the major parties in Muslim
areas. Actually, it hasn’t just struck me; it’s what Enoch Powell predicted in a speech called ‘The Road To National Suicide”
Guy Otten's name will appear on the ballot paper, but soon after the campaign began the Green Party said he would be stepping down over previously criticising Palestinians and the Islamic religion.
A Green Party spokesperson said: "The Rochdale Green Party candidate has said that he has 'decided to leave the stage' following social media posts made some years ago. As nominations have now closed, his name will still appear on the ballot. However, he will not take part in any campaigning between now and polling day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-68250468
That's before we get on to Galloway and Danczuk What is it with Rochdale?
As you say, it could get very messy indeed.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/ai-made-books-with-sick-lies-about-king-charles-cancer-prompt-furious-response-f/
MarkHertling
@MarkHertling
·
1h
First, it’s not likely that any President of any European country said this. Because there’s no “paying” to anyone involved.
Second, Trump just doesn’t understand NATO or Russia, and he is endangering all of Europe with this incredibly dumb statement
https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1756441857146409212
2. Unbelievable hispanics are apparently switching from Biden to Trump 2.0.
"I didn't think he meant me and my cousin when he said 'deport'"
You aware of the publication of the interim covid report this summer?
The stagnation, perhaps even technical recession of the economy, meaning growth, jobs, business closures all going the wrong way?
You aware of the growth in channel crossings this summer and autumn, partly because Europe tanked up on migrants last year meaning modelling shows UK on for something matching or exceeding worst year yet for channel crossing, and partly because the low hanging Albanian fruit was picked last year making the current status looking like it’s going in right direction, but in contrast caused by last years apparent success, by autumn the chart will show it going wrong way again.
Yes, inflation has come down, but how quickly you saying that actually works through the system to voters rewarding government? Quite the opposite, high interest rates and mortgage renewals will be costing the Tories votes all through this year.
Six months time means six months more of biggest vote loser of all, party splits and attacks on Sunak: not least anger following the May 2nd set of elections, and the increase in boat crossings.
And what will the increase in boat crossings this year do to the haemorrhage of Tory voters to Reform?
And six months comes dangerously close to another disastrous vote losing Party Conference, haunted by outgoing government vibe and illustrated by Farage and Patel dancing on Sunak’s political grave?
There’s other things not quite so certain to happen, but could happen - markets paying attention to interest paid on UKs huge debt as the government cuts tax intake and gives other giveaways. Or Biden’s desire for economic strength for his re-election campaign creates a run on other currencies around the world. Ukraine having a bad summer in the war. A Vonc triggered in Sunak’s leadership.
You made it sound so so simple, Bonde. Maybe there’s more to consider than you thought in timing election campaigns for the best result. If I was being paid a lot of money to get best possible election result for Tories this year, I would have told them months ago it’s May 2nd. 😁
Most likely it would be “Donald” or “President Trump”/“Mr President”
Fujitsu 'to have received £3.4bn in Treasury-linked deals active since 2019' despite role in Post Office scandal
https://news.sky.com/story/fujitsu-to-have-received-3-4bn-in-treasury-linked-deals-active-since-2019-despite-role-in-post-office-scandal-13068455
"Opinion
Ross Douthat
The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside. It’s How."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/opinion/joe-biden-convention-2024.html
Edit to add: Not a bad piece TBF
I think the Biden delegates just choose Kamala Harris and he made it worse by not endorsing her?