Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
I don't know you are right but suspect you are. If so it bodes well for a disciplined Government - at least for the first year or two and at least incomparison to the shower we curently have in power (which I admit might not be saying much).
It does however perhaps bode ill for the longer term if Labour are simply keeping their more radical plans well hidden away and intend to follow a very different set of policies once they are in power.
I know what you mean. My sense is they won't believe they've won till they have, hence the caution verging on paranoia, and once settled in they will loosen up a bit and be a good reforming government. Of course the cynics might be right and I'll be disappointed. It's a 50/50 since solid evidence isn't there either way. We'll just have to see. Proof pudding etc.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
@Gardenwalker Giles Coren is the one writer I consistently look to ignore in The Times.
Every single thing he writes or says irritates me. He seems to be labouring under the impression he's a really insightful wag.
It's a mystery why they continue to employ him.
There's a reprehensible Jimmy Carr type joke somewhere in that 'Giles Coren / Jews fleeing Britain' space.
Interesting flavour of anti Semitism in your discourse. Unexpected. And, given that this is you, you are probably entirely unaware of it
Really? Your antisemitism detector has beeped, has it. That's a worry. I shall look closely on my next self-audit. Always done with bracing honesty and due by the end of the month.
Living as you do in quite a jewish area I would have hoped someone like yourself would be more careful.
I do but I mix widely. Eg some of my best friends are right wing islamophobes who pretend to care about antisemitism because it allows them to kick back and slag off Muslims.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
I don't know you are right but suspect you are. If so it bodes well for a disciplined Government - at least for the first year or two and at least incomparison to the shower we curently have in power (which I admit might not be saying much).
It does however perhaps bode ill for the longer term if Labour are simply keeping their more radical plans well hidden away and intend to follow a very different set of policies once they are in power.
I know what you mean. My sense is they won't believe they've won till they have, hence the caution verging on paranoia, and once settled in they will loosen up a bit and be a good reforming government. Of course the cynics might be right and I'll be disappointed. It's a 50/50 since solid evidence isn't there either way. We'll just have to see. Proof pudding etc.
I suspect that there will be very tight spending controls for a couple of years, just as there were in 97-99. In part to establish market confidence, and in part to better understand the problems and decide priorities, then a gradual rise in spending in years 3-5 of the Parliament.
It's quite likely that Labour will be fortunate in hitting the right point in the economic cycle, and getting better than anticipated growth to square the circle.
I think @Casino_Royale is being overly paranoid in looking at hiding money. If there are new rules on pensions or ISAs it will be limiting tax relief to basic rate on pensions, having a lifetime allowance for ISAs, etc.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
I don't know you are right but suspect you are. If so it bodes well for a disciplined Government - at least for the first year or two and at least incomparison to the shower we curently have in power (which I admit might not be saying much).
It does however perhaps bode ill for the longer term if Labour are simply keeping their more radical plans well hidden away and intend to follow a very different set of policies once they are in power.
I know what you mean. My sense is they won't believe they've won till they have, hence the caution verging on paranoia, and once settled in they will loosen up a bit and be a good reforming government. Of course the cynics might be right and I'll be disappointed. It's a 50/50 since solid evidence isn't there either way. We'll just have to see. Proof pudding etc.
Of course, the problem with submitting to a Tory-designed fiscal straight jacket at the outset of your term is that, if you decide you need a lot more cash a bit further down the road, you're entirely reliant on a swift return to strong economic growth - and thus, a pain-free boost to tax receipts - in order to provide it. After all, Labour hasn't just committed to avoid jacking up income tax and NI any further, which is probably fair, but they've also refused to instigate measures to raid asset wealth (e.g. through a wealth tax or the equalisation of CGT rates) as well. They've left themselves with few levers to pull unless they perform a complete volte face once in office and open themselves up to the charge of having lied through their teeth in the manifesto, which would further degrade the already low public opinion of the political class.
Now, if you turn out to be right and we get some kind of progress from the next lot then I'll be pleasantly surprised, but perhaps you can understand my scepticism? Listen to some of the language coming out of the Opposition: to paraphrase, if it waddles like a conservative and quacks like a conservative, it's probably a conservative.
Yeah.... looking at that Twitter feed; need a better source.
why?
Some other 'information' on it: "🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar." "BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon" "JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
So do I have it right that the Nigel is coming back to lead ReFUK? I know its only the Express, but even so...
If he could take Braverman and a few others with him, then maybe the conservative party can rediscover how to reinvent itself and let the public issue a 'coup de grace' on RefUK and the right
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
Yeah.... looking at that Twitter feed; need a better source.
why?
Some other 'information' on it: "🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar." "BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon" "JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
etc, etc.
Are you saying that it might (might) be just a touch biased?
If I was a Jew I don’t think I’d feel safe in large parts of london - if I was wearing a skullcap or Star of David necklace, or walking into a synagogue or a Jewish school
Ditto Paris or any number of Western European cities
What a tragic thing we have done
First, most Jews in London do not wear identifying clothing or jewellery, and I doubt they see the inside of a synagogue between weddings and funerals (and bar/bat mitzvahs). Second, have Jewish schools reported an uptick in truancy as pupils cower under their kitchen tables? Have synagogue congregations fallen away? Or have you fallen for mischief-making again?
ETA Paris has been problematic for years, in a way London has not and is not.
I live about 200 yards from the Jewish museum in Camden (now sadly closed). I watched over the years as security there got tighter and more overt. By the end they sometimes had semi-permanent guards
As for london being safe for Jews you maybe missed this video
“A man just attacked Jewish people with a large knife in a Jewish neighbourhood of London. This is absolutely terrifying. Jews are under violent attack everywhere. What brave men holding him off and stopping him hurting anyone. @Shomrim”
Do you think my friends - and Giles Coren - are all lying when they say they feel unsafe and are considering leaving the UK?
Imagine how unsafe the Palestinians in Gaza must be feeling.
Unsafe enough to round up Hamas and hand them over to the IDF yet?
Why don't you nip out, round up the local county lines drugs gang, and hand them over to the police? It should be easy. They won't have as many guns as Hamas, and there aren't as many of them.
A fair point. Sorry, but I want the war over as soon as possible and Sunil juvenile take on affairs gets my goat.
How about just asking Hamas to hand over the hostages?
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Yeah.... looking at that Twitter feed; need a better source.
why?
Some other 'information' on it: "🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar." "BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon" "JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
etc, etc.
Are you saying that it might (might) be just a touch biased?
No, not just biased. 'Biased' can imply good factual information, although one sided. This can be useful.
That twitter feed just makes assertions, with few links or other evidence. And one of the sites it does link to occasionally seems to be a crypto-scam one.
Imagine if you are French and Jewish, looking at those stats. 1m mainly young French Muslim people HATE you, just for being Jewish, and they are happy to admit it
3 million want to see your homeland - Israel - destroyed entirely
Meanwhile half of them want Islam to take over France and impose shariah law on all France
Would you, as a Jew, feel safe in France?
I would think that there would be good reason for most Jews not to feel safe in most places, and, similarly, if they're not actively thinking about those reasons then they might feel safe pretty much anywhere, unless they've had personal experience to make them feel otherwise.
Ironically, European Jews are now much much safer in EASTERN Europe (historically the cradle of anti-Semitism) - because Eastern Europe has tiny Muslim populations
Or south east Asia. No history of anti Semitism
If I was Jewish and rich I’d move to Singapore, if I was less rich I’d move to Cambodia or Thailand
But in the days after its opening, a number of Indonesian Muslim leaders, including several senior members of the influential Indonesian Council of Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) declared that the museum should be shut down, on the grounds that it could cause “communal tensions.” MUI Vice President Muhyidin Junaidi opined that “the presence of the museum is politically tendentious and a provocation to cause uproar among the people.”
I'd suggest the root cause here is certain "revealed by God" attitudes / values which are foundational in Islam. A tricky one to deal with in less than 500 years.
Well, yeah, you wouldn’t go to MUSLIM South Asia. No. But polls show Buddhist Asia is possibly the least anti semitic place on earth - eg Laos
Now that I'm not up to much and still waiting for baby number 2 to arrive I've been catching up on random shite that I missed over the last few years, one of which is the Heard vs Depp trial from the US. It's absolutely box office and really shows our judicial process in a very negative light. The amount of evidence that was presented in the US trial that was deemed inadmissible in the UK one is absolutely wild.
It really does feel as though Heard went into the courtroom and batted her eyelashes at the old fool of a judge and he fell for it. Some of the picture evidence provided in support of the "wife beating" was truly laughable and some of the things she said were just fantastical and completely contradictory. In some instances she says he walks out and she won't see him for days after she got mad at him and in the next sentence she's saying he punched her in the back of the head multiple times though she didn't go for any medical exams, made no police reports and took no pictures which showed any significant pictures. That our justice system didn't allow any of this evidence to be shown and tested in open court is a huge shortcoming, that Heard could, ostensibly, bewitch the old male judge with a smile and a few eyelash flutters is another huge shortcoming. The case was, of course not the same parties, yet the evidence was absolutely relevant to determining the truth of the statement that labelled him a "wife beater".
Also, Camile Vasquez is an absolute star. The way she methodically tears Heard's testimony to shreds over the 90 minute session is truly a sight to behold. My wife and I have been watching all of the sessions on YouTube and it's properly compulsive viewing. I'm also shocked that the advice to Heard wasn't to settle because there's no doubt that this trial did her more reputational harm than a settlement would have done. The lawyers got that wrong but it may have been the case that she didn't want to in which case they should have refused the case.
All in all, if anyone hasn't watched it they absolutely should. The Depp legal team give a master class in presenting an evidence based case, retaining the services of true experts in their fields as witnesses and trial lawyers that are among the best in their field at extracting the truth from opposition witnesses.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
Now that I'm not up to much and still waiting for baby number 2 to arrive I've been catching up on random shite that I missed over the last few years, one of which is the Heard vs Depp trial from the US. It's absolutely box office and really shows our judicial process in a very negative light. The amount of evidence that was presented in the US trial that was deemed inadmissible in the UK one is absolutely wild.
It really does feel as though Heard went into the courtroom and batted her eyelashes at the old fool of a judge and he fell for it. Some of the picture evidence provided in support of the "wife beating" was truly laughable and some of the things she said were just fantastical and completely contradictory. In some instances she says he walks out and she won't see him for days after she got mad at him and in the next sentence she's saying he punched her in the back of the head multiple times though she didn't go for any medical exams, made no police reports and took no pictures which showed any significant pictures. That our justice system didn't allow any of this evidence to be shown and tested in open court is a huge shortcoming, that Heard could, ostensibly, bewitch the old male judge with a smile and a few eyelash flutters is another huge shortcoming. The case was, of course not the same parties, yet the evidence was absolutely relevant to determining the truth of the statement that labelled him a "wife beater".
Also, Camile Vasquez is an absolute star. The way she methodically tears Heard's testimony to shreds over the 90 minute session is truly a sight to behold. My wife and I have been watching all of the sessions on YouTube and it's properly compulsive viewing. I'm also shocked that the advice to Heard wasn't to settle because there's no doubt that this trial did her more reputational harm than a settlement would have done. The lawyers got that wrong but it may have been the case that she didn't want to in which case they should have refused the case.
All in all, if anyone hasn't watched it they absolutely should. The Depp legal team give a master class in presenting an evidence based case, retaining the services of true experts in their fields as witnesses and trial lawyers that are among the best in their field at extracting the truth from opposition witnesses.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
Now that I'm not up to much and still waiting for baby number 2 to arrive I've been catching up on random shite that I missed over the last few years, one of which is the Heard vs Depp trial from the US. It's absolutely box office and really shows our judicial process in a very negative light. The amount of evidence that was presented in the US trial that was deemed inadmissible in the UK one is absolutely wild.
It really does feel as though Heard went into the courtroom and batted her eyelashes at the old fool of a judge and he fell for it. Some of the picture evidence provided in support of the "wife beating" was truly laughable and some of the things she said were just fantastical and completely contradictory. In some instances she says he walks out and she won't see him for days after she got mad at him and in the next sentence she's saying he punched her in the back of the head multiple times though she didn't go for any medical exams, made no police reports and took no pictures which showed any significant pictures. That our justice system didn't allow any of this evidence to be shown and tested in open court is a huge shortcoming, that Heard could, ostensibly, bewitch the old male judge with a smile and a few eyelash flutters is another huge shortcoming. The case was, of course not the same parties, yet the evidence was absolutely relevant to determining the truth of the statement that labelled him a "wife beater".
Also, Camile Vasquez is an absolute star. The way she methodically tears Heard's testimony to shreds over the 90 minute session is truly a sight to behold. My wife and I have been watching all of the sessions on YouTube and it's properly compulsive viewing. I'm also shocked that the advice to Heard wasn't to settle because there's no doubt that this trial did her more reputational harm than a settlement would have done. The lawyers got that wrong but it may have been the case that she didn't want to in which case they should have refused the case.
All in all, if anyone hasn't watched it they absolutely should. The Depp legal team give a master class in presenting an evidence based case, retaining the services of true experts in their fields as witnesses and trial lawyers that are among the best in their field at extracting the truth from opposition witnesses.
As I said, it's absolute box office. One of the sessions with Heard and her own lawyer taking the witness statement where Vasquez objects every other sentence and the judge sustains 9/10 of them is brilliant lawyering. A must see.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
"Trump endorsed anti-LGBTQ Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says his secret profile seeking gay sex that was discovered by AP was just a “prank.”..."
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I think you are wrong: as 10 year yields dropped from almost 5% to 4%, the need for further capitalisation disappeared.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
James I wrote the treatise on it. And Scotland was where they used to burn witches, in England we merely hanged 'em (unless they were convicted of petty treason, mostly murdering their husband)
"Trump endorsed anti-LGBTQ Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says his secret profile seeking gay sex that was discovered by AP was just a “prank.”..."
Because the more that some men react against gays and the idea of gays, the more you know that they crave cock.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I think you are wrong: as 10 year yields dropped from almost 5% to 4%, the need for further capitalisation disappeared.
There will be because the BoE is still selling bonds into the secondary market at a loss, the average bond value is down ~8-10% for the Bank's holding vs current market value, I think yields would have to fall to ~2% for the break even point to be hit or the bank would have to stop selling bonds into the secondary market and just hold them to maturity.
Somewhat related, but recently I was talking to two juniors about Blackadder and just met with blank expressions. Sent them a picture of Rowan Atkinson and they both said 'Oh! Mister Bean!'.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
James I wrote the treatise on it. And Scotland was where they used to burn witches, in England we merely hanged 'em (unless they were convicted of petty treason, mostly murdering their husband)
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
I am not recommending we set up any new coal fired power stations for consumer electricity - as we've discussed, we don't mine standard coal.
I do think that concerning waste from energy plants, there's a lot of nimbyism and it's a shame that this wasn't pushed through as emergency legislation when the energy crisis first came about.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
It's still a surprise they are struggling to recruit when they are all on £100k with gold-plated pensions. I just can't for the life of me figure it out.
I'm also puzzled why our recent "Must be more skilled than Linus Torvalds" job advert which offered almost as much pay as a till assistant in Lidl had no applicants.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
What is needed is a smaller number of higher skilled people with higher quality support systems.
But that would take (drum roll) investment overs decade to achieve.
Yeah.... looking at that Twitter feed; need a better source.
why?
Some other 'information' on it: "🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar." "BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon" "JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
etc, etc.
The de use of the dollar has been forecast for many many years. Never happens.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
James I wrote the treatise on it. And Scotland was where they used to burn witches, in England we merely hanged 'em (unless they were convicted of petty treason, mostly murdering their husband)
If anybody wants to look at James I's "Demonology" (the treatise), it was dramatised by Atun-Shei two years ago. It's a difficult watch due to his insistence on using Original Pronounciation (a reconstructed estimate of accent at the time), plus it's lengthy at 103 minutes. Here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXVQCss9yyo
Now that I'm not up to much and still waiting for baby number 2 to arrive I've been catching up on random shite that I missed over the last few years, one of which is the Heard vs Depp trial from the US. It's absolutely box office and really shows our judicial process in a very negative light. The amount of evidence that was presented in the US trial that was deemed inadmissible in the UK one is absolutely wild.
It really does feel as though Heard went into the courtroom and batted her eyelashes at the old fool of a judge and he fell for it. Some of the picture evidence provided in support of the "wife beating" was truly laughable and some of the things she said were just fantastical and completely contradictory. In some instances she says he walks out and she won't see him for days after she got mad at him and in the next sentence she's saying he punched her in the back of the head multiple times though she didn't go for any medical exams, made no police reports and took no pictures which showed any significant pictures. That our justice system didn't allow any of this evidence to be shown and tested in open court is a huge shortcoming, that Heard could, ostensibly, bewitch the old male judge with a smile and a few eyelash flutters is another huge shortcoming. The case was, of course not the same parties, yet the evidence was absolutely relevant to determining the truth of the statement that labelled him a "wife beater".
Also, Camile Vasquez is an absolute star. The way she methodically tears Heard's testimony to shreds over the 90 minute session is truly a sight to behold. My wife and I have been watching all of the sessions on YouTube and it's properly compulsive viewing. I'm also shocked that the advice to Heard wasn't to settle because there's no doubt that this trial did her more reputational harm than a settlement would have done. The lawyers got that wrong but it may have been the case that she didn't want to in which case they should have refused the case.
All in all, if anyone hasn't watched it they absolutely should. The Depp legal team give a master class in presenting an evidence based case, retaining the services of true experts in their fields as witnesses and trial lawyers that are among the best in their field at extracting the truth from opposition witnesses.
Whilst it is nice to see you back, this is an odd subject even by PB standards. Did you put an assessment of Trump vs Biden in November on r/Fauxmoi/ and get the two mixed up?
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
It's still a surprise they are struggling to recruit when they are all on £100k with gold-plated pensions. I just can't for the life of me figure it out.
I'm also puzzled why our recent "Must be more skilled than Linus Torvalds" job advert which offered almost as much pay as a till assistant in Lidl had no applicants.
It's a puzzle.
It's no puzzle - there is a serious and growing under employment problem. I know of any number of local authorities who cannot fill vacancies and when jobs are advertised, they get no applicants.
We need a fundamental re-think about work and employment and it may be jobs can be deleted from structures but there is a consequence if you want services to be provided at previous levels.
Unfortunately, the paucity of thinking among those who support the Government seems evident as they have only two ideas - one, cut taxes and two, cut them again. I suppose there's also the one about forcing people back to the workplace.
If I was a Jew I don’t think I’d feel safe in large parts of london - if I was wearing a skullcap or Star of David necklace, or walking into a synagogue or a Jewish school
Ditto Paris or any number of Western European cities
What a tragic thing we have done
First, most Jews in London do not wear identifying clothing or jewellery, and I doubt they see the inside of a synagogue between weddings and funerals (and bar/bat mitzvahs). Second, have Jewish schools reported an uptick in truancy as pupils cower under their kitchen tables? Have synagogue congregations fallen away? Or have you fallen for mischief-making again?
ETA Paris has been problematic for years, in a way London has not and is not.
I live about 200 yards from the Jewish museum in Camden (now sadly closed). I watched over the years as security there got tighter and more overt. By the end they sometimes had semi-permanent guards
As for london being safe for Jews you maybe missed this video
“A man just attacked Jewish people with a large knife in a Jewish neighbourhood of London. This is absolutely terrifying. Jews are under violent attack everywhere. What brave men holding him off and stopping him hurting anyone. @Shomrim”
i dont think things are that bad for jews here yet. talk about getting out is one thing actually doing it is another. I would say on antisemitism we are similar to germany in the 1920s. It is there percolating underground in private conversations and on social media but not yet at the stage where there is much overt discrimination or violence against Jews. However the Jews are right that antisemitism is much more rife now and I dont think that will change in the near future.
I really don't see much anti-semitism in London. Definitely not like 1920s Germany - I'm astonished you said that. There's obviously currently an upswing from the Muslims, but its just the nutters and the daft, and principally sparked by the current conflict. Some slight random crap from those that want to find an enemy and don't care who it is too.
Oh trust me if you talk to many muslims they soon become anti semtic not all but a very significant number.
I'm sure that's true. I don't like any religions. Islam, I hope. is currently in a growing up phase.
If you're going to make your life around an irrational belief then I think you ought to give the rest of the world a good degree of space in terms of their beliefs. It doesn't turn out that way though.
What evidence is there that Islam is currently growing up? Or is it one of those irrational things you are believing on faith?
Quite so
There is zero evidence for this. Indeed looking at that depressing French poll the opposite is the case. The young are more radical, desire shariah law more, are more anti semitic than their parents. Etc
Bleak
The young are always the most radical politically as they have the least assets to lose from revolution.
However I doubt most would support what Sharia law actually means ie including restrictions on the rights of women and homosexuals
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Whilst I'm sure at least one will do so, I can't help thinking that one of the unsung usages of such a complainants charter will be to assess the nature of all the complaints, not just those who JC MP KC disapproves of. You may be aware of my cynicism about free speech in the UK ("it doesn't exist and the only thing the statistician can do is track it"). If this database is public then it will be a valuable statistical resource, albeit an immoral one.
(incidentally, are the various police hate crimes registers in the UK publically available? Can I get hold of them?)
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
There are real issues of productivity in the public services, but largely due to poor staff retention, poor morale, and lack of investment in capital, buildings and training.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Whilst I'm sure at least one will do so, I can't help thinking that one of the unsung usages of such a complainants charter will be to assess the nature of all the complaints, not just those who JC MP KC disapproves of. You may be aware of my cynicism about free speech in the UK ("it doesn't exist and the only thing the statistician can do is track it"). If this database is public then it will be a valuable statistical resource, albeit an immoral one.
(incidentally, are the various police hate crimes registers in the UK publically available? Can I get hold of them?)
The noteworthy thing about this legislation - apart from the fact that it will almost certainly fall foul of the ECHR - is that women were specifically excluded from it. So it is fine to be hateful towards women in Scotland or to stir up hatred against them.
This was contrary to the recommendation made by the Judge who reviewed this area of the law a few years ago. Apparently the SNP will get round to considering what to do about hatred of women in 2026. Or, more likely, never.
Three other points to note:
1. You can make reports anonymously. 2. The police have stated that they will investigate every single report, even though they have already said that they will not investigate all burglaries and other crimes. 3. They have already managed to describe what the law says incorrectly.
As with all such laws, the process is the punishment.
But - given 1 and 2 above - it is very easy to see how the law and the police could easily be gummed up and made to look ridiculous. Anonymous allegations of hate crimes against all SNP MSPs and senior police officers, for instance.
We are Czechia, a proud 10-million country whose President does phone calls with President of Taiwan and we just got about a million artillery shells to Ukrainian defenders while Germany and France do a pissing contest over egos.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
The productivity issues in the public sector seem to be pretty much the same as in the private sector. We do after all have one of the least productive, least investment oriented private sectors in the developed world, with relatively poor levels of pay.
High staff turnover, limited training, lack of investment in capital equipment and technology, a focus on quantity over quality. These are British problems, not public or private sector problems.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
Quite. In answer to Stodge's question, yes, seriously. We have a state that has ballooned, meanwhile its productivity has dropped by 7% - more people, doing less. Whilst we pontificate on the non-affordability of letting people keep a bit more of what they earn.
Trump 2 will be very different to Trump 1. Much harder edged with a more competent team around him. He will use his office to exact retribution and encourage a cult of personality. Trump 1 was a clownshow Trump 2 will be something much darker. I also think he will use his office to encourage hard right movements in Europe and the UK.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Whilst I'm sure at least one will do so, I can't help thinking that one of the unsung usages of such a complainants charter will be to assess the nature of all the complaints, not just those who JC MP KC disapproves of. You may be aware of my cynicism about free speech in the UK ("it doesn't exist and the only thing the statistician can do is track it"). If this database is public then it will be a valuable statistical resource, albeit an immoral one.
(incidentally, are the various police hate crimes registers in the UK publically available? Can I get hold of them?)
The noteworthy thing about this legislation - apart from the fact that it will almost certainly fall foul of the ECHR - is that women were specifically excluded from it. So it is fine to be hateful towards women in Scotland or to stir up hatred against them.
This was contrary to the recommendation made by the Judge who reviewed this area of the law a few years ago. Apparently the SNP will get round to considering what to do about hatred of women in 2026. Or, more likely, never.
Three other points to note:
1. You can make reports anonymously. 2. The police have stated that they will investigate every single report, even though they have already said that they will not investigate all burglaries and other crimes. 3. They have already managed to describe what the law says incorrectly.
As with all such laws, the process is the punishment.
But - given 1 and 2 above - it is very easy to see how the law and the police could easily be gummed up and made to look ridiculous. Anonymous allegations of hate crimes against all SNP MSPs and senior police officers, for instance.
So a McStasi. Well, that's not going to go wrong...
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Putin has popular support. The reason the election is rigged to exclude a possible anti-Putin popular candidate is not because Putin would lose the popular vote but because there might be a danger of such an opponent scoring e.g. a high % with the intelligentsia especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. That wouldn't be so likely, though, given it's wartime. But you could imagine a western-flavoured candidate winning too many intelligentsia votes for full silovik and three-letter-agency comfort.
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Trump 2 will be very different to Trump 1. Much harder edged with a more competent team around him. He will use his office to exact retribution and encourage a cult of personality. Trump 1 was a clownshow Trump 2 will be something much darker. I also think he will use his office to encourage hard right movements in Europe and the UK.
It's a bit like Leon's description of anti-semitism upthread - Trump's detractors want us to believe that he's an intellectually sub-normal manchild who never achieved anything, or believed in anything in his stupid life, but at the same time, he's an evil genius who's going to mastermind the fascist takeover of the West.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
Uncannily similar to what I said on here a few days ago: the world has never before been this INTERESTING
Brace
Gabriele D'Annunzio and Jorge Ubico live! Ante Pavelic and that Austrian guy probably said similar things.
ISTR a Master of Trinity saying something similar about his term of mastership.
AI = the real Fall. That's if it succeeds. "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" as B F Skinner put it.
Meanwhile, man posts tweet and man posts one-liner to web forum. Perhaps half the fall has happened already. I don't know whether you saw that public discussion between Elon Musk and Benyamin Netanyahu. They had a laugh recognising that the near-universal carrying of smartphones has gone a long way towards the famed fudging of the brain-computer interface already.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
I think you’ll find your best evah English queen bestowed him upon you.
Given that James VI didn't start a civil war, he was a distinct improvement on quite a ferw of his predecessors or successors. Greatly underestimated in my view.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
The productivity issues in the public sector seem to be pretty much the same as in the private sector. We do after all have one of the least productive, least investment oriented private sectors in the developed world, with relatively poor levels of pay.
High staff turnover, limited training, lack of investment in capital equipment and technology, a focus on quantity over quality. These are British problems, not public or private sector problems.
But the causes of the low productivity in both sectors are not the same, because the causes always lie in the consequences. The consequence of being unproductive and useless in the public sector is that someone gives you more money to sort it out. That is why they've become so unproductive.
Low productivity in the private sector (which is not at a comparable level) is at least partly down to the ready availability of imported labour, plus I suppose the tendency, reinforced by the tax system, to want fast returns, discouraging longer term investment.
Trump 2 will be very different to Trump 1. Much harder edged with a more competent team around him. He will use his office to exact retribution and encourage a cult of personality. Trump 1 was a clownshow Trump 2 will be something much darker. I also think he will use his office to encourage hard right movements in Europe and the UK.
The SNP's hate crime legislation comes into force on 1 April (I kid you not). I suspect it will go the same way as the gender stuff. Ad yes, they really have created a cartoon Hate Monster. Why do they do this kind of thing? Why is Yousaf so useless? Anyway,here's an extract from Iain McWhirter (formerly BBC journo) on it:
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
Didn’t Canada try this a while back? And discover that it was a Witch Smellers charter?
Scotland was the British capital of witch-hunting according to the BBC:
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
I think you’ll find your best evah English queen bestowed him upon you.
Given that James VI didn't start a civil war, he was a distinct improvement on quite a ferw of his predecessors or successors. Greatly underestimated in my view.
His successor was certainly a rum cove. I blame the parents.
Well, exactly. Anyone who attracts popular support is, err, barred.
Or they suffer an unfortunate accident.
Usually involving a window.
Asked about Navalny's death, Putin says his name in public for the first time in 11 years.
"As concerns Mr Navalny. Yes, he passed away. This is always a tragic event, but there were other events when people in prison died. Hasn't that happened in the US? Of course it has" https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1769474710033551836
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
Meanwhile, in Graunland, the horrifying realisation that one Tory Government is simply going to be replaced by another is dawning...
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
Why do you give no credence to the idea that Labour are simply taking no unnecessary risks with an election around the corner and a 20 point poll lead?
That is an equally good explanation for their caution as your thesis that they aren't planning to change anything.
Because it makes a great deal more sense than the notion that they are going to throw their manifesto into the recycling bin a week into their term and rediscover a taste for social democracy. If you can't argue the case for a meaningful programme of redistribution and investment when your opponents are as bad as this lot, then when can you?
The most likely scenario is that Labour means what it says and will play its term as a kind of mirror image of the Coalition Government: yet more austerity, though in this case practiced by Labour ministers whilst they pin the blame for the resultant suffering on the mistakes made by the previous Conservative administration.
The decay of the fabric of the state can only be repaired with truly heroic sums of money. Half the population (the poor, the young, working people on low to middle incomes) have already been bled white by a combination of inflation, taxation of their earnings, colossal rents/mortgages and austerity, and have little left to give. The other half (homeowners over the age of about 50, and the very wealthy) control the bulk of the nation's assets, but mostly believe that they have a God-given right not to be asked to pay for anything. The money can only come from the latter group but the politicians won't extract any loot from them, because (a) they are terrified of their power at the ballot box, and (b) they themselves mostly belong to this class, and the younger ones that aren't quite there yet are well-paid and have reasonable aspirations to join it.
The vague Huntreevesian guff about digging the country out of its malaise through "reform" and a magical return to rampant economic growth, if only we consent to put up with austerity for another thirty or forty years, disguises the bald truth: stagnation doesn't matter if the existing economic settlement acts as an engine for the redistribution of wealth upwards - through pensions, property price inflation and rents - and your people (the fellow members of your socio-economic class/favoured voter group) therefore continue to get richer, even as the rest of the country falls apart. Beneath all the high-blown rhetoric, this is the core prospectus that Government and Opposition will both be peddling come the election. It's nothing more than a contest to determine who can manage decline most efficiently, to the benefit of the already well-off.
There's nothing magical or mythical about a return to economic growth - it's just what happens when you don't tax, levy, and regulate it into extinction. The resentment against an age group that's managed to do slightly better out of the post 1997 economic shitshow (mainly due to investing in bricks and mortar, which hasn't declined in value the way everything else has) is daft. It's divide and rule.
The money needed to deal with the tsunami of need from elderly people, sick people, poverty stricken people and a decaying public infrastructure is not going to come from a radical libertarian program of deregulation and tax cuts. You might wish it were so, but it's not.
As for divide and rule, what do you think the last decade and a half has been all about?
Tax returns are hugely affected by growth or lack of it in the economy, hence pulling in the horns on tax cuts (though somehow never on the size of the state) becomes a self-fulfilling death spiral. If we want *any* of the money you seem to think we need, growing the pie is of massively higher importance than thinking about how unfair it is that boomers have kept a bit more pie than everyone else.
Private sector growth is very important indeed, but we can't afford to cut taxes - and with them spending - absolutely to the bone, in the hope that growth will somehow plug the gap and magically resolve the situation within the next few years. Firstly much of the public realm is already on its knees, and secondly the devotion to economic stimulus through tax cuts at the expense of all else ignores the fact that social breakdown, a crumbling school estate and especially a failing healthcare system are significant drags on growth in and of themselves. How do we get young people into decent employment if children are too cold and hungry to learn? How do we deal with the problem of people becoming too sick to work if they're getting into that state through being unable to access timely health care? How do we have a transport network that's functional and efficient if buses are being cut in most of the country, and people are thus being forced onto congested roads, full of potholes, in old bangers that they can barely afford to run and maintain?
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
If you really want practical suggestions, I have several, though not perhaps the time to expound on them in detail.
1. The low hanging fruit. Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
Exactly none of next year's projected budget deficit comes from 1.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
There are, however, ~1m more public sector employees today than in 2017. It is the source of a major part of our deficit.
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
I se we're playing the old game of "let's get rid of some public sector pen pushers because they're all working from home and useless". It's up there with "if Labour get in, I'm going to emigrate to (fill in the blank) or I'm going to put all my money into gold coins and hide it under my mattress".
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I say we randomly thanos 1m public sector employees from non public facing roles and see what happens. The reason the public sector can't compete on salary is because there's too many people to pay. Have fewer people and there's budget for more competitive salaries.
NHS England has been seeking 40% staff cuts, almost at Thanos levels, following merger with NHS Digital and Health Education England. The result has been huge delays in various things NHS England are meant to do while everyone has been more concerned about re-applying for their job.
Comments
And were all pushed through it.
China moving full square on Russias side.
JUST IN: China says they're prepared to intervene militarily if United States or NATO attacks Russia.
https://x.com/BRICSinfo/status/1769421726545269099?s=20
It's quite likely that Labour will be fortunate in hitting the right point in the economic cycle, and getting better than anticipated growth to square the circle.
I think @Casino_Royale is being overly paranoid in looking at hiding money. If there are new rules on pensions or ISAs it will be limiting tax relief to basic rate on pensions, having a lifetime allowance for ISAs, etc.
Now, if you turn out to be right and we get some kind of progress from the next lot then I'll be pleasantly surprised, but perhaps you can understand my scepticism? Listen to some of the language coming out of the Opposition: to paraphrase, if it waddles like a conservative and quacks like a conservative, it's probably a conservative.
But, I could see it clocking sub 50% in a free and fair election this time given what's happened.
why?
Some other 'information' on it:
"🇷🇺 Russia's President Putin says if oil producers in the Middle East stop using the US dollar, it will be the end of the dollar."
"BRICS Ambassador Says US Dollar-Dominated World Will End Soon"
"JUST IN: 🇫🇷 Thousands of people protest in France calling for an end to the war in Ukraine against Russia and France's withdrawal from NATO."
etc, etc.
Just now need Liverpool to lose out on the title by 1 or 2 points and United would have knocked them out of the cup and deprived them of the title
In a poor season that would be very acceptable
The state is in need of repair, this is necessary for a successful economy, and - whilst much of what's needed to invest in infrastructure can plausibly come from borrowing - the day-to-day costs of employing, for example, a great many more health and social care workers (and on better wages that make the jobs more attractive and sustainable) can only come through raising revenue.
In short, if we want a country that works then some people are going to have to pay more for the privilege. It's unavoidable.
Just make a law that declares he has won with an 80 seat majority again.
How about just asking Hamas to hand over the hostages?
A new bogeyman has been invented to scare Scottish children at night: the Hate Monster. Resembling a reject from Sesame Street, this carton icon of negative emotion has been enlisted by Police Scotland to publicise the Scottish government’s controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which will finally come into force on April 1st. ...This is illiberal and probably unworkable legislation supposedly designed to protect from abuse people with the characteristics of “disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity”. Though not, you will note, people with the characteristic of being a woman. They are somehow excluded from this hierarchy of victimhood.
Actually, according to the Hate Monster, this has very little to do with protected characteristics. “If you or someone you know is a victim of hate”, says Police Scotland’s campaign baldly, “report it”. No reference there to the Equality Act or categories of “aggravated” crime. The perpetrators of hate, we’re told, are mostly young men aged 18-30 from “socially excluded communities” who have “ideas about white-male entitlement”. ...
I don’t know who invented this risible campaign, but it has certainly worked in one way: it has alerted people to the repressive idiocy of the Scottish government’s new crime of “stirring up hatred”. For, in Scotland next month you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is what is called a “third party reporting centre” set up by Police Scotland to provide a “safe space” for people to accuse others of hate crime. There will be 411 of these “snitching centres” the lengths and breadth of Scotland conveniently located everywhere from libraries to mushroom farms. ....
....As the SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC forecasts, the law will most likely be “weaponised” first against gender critical women. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, of being a transphobe to their hearts content by dropping in to one of the hundreds of third party reporting stations. The trans campaigner, India Willoughby, has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing JK Rowling in Scotland where she lives. They might even succeed. For this new law takes us into uncharted legal territory.
That twitter feed just makes assertions, with few links or other evidence. And one of the sites it does link to occasionally seems to be a crypto-scam one.
*innnocent face*
I'm not sure what the current reference would be, but did you mean "Indochinese Peninsula"?
It really does feel as though Heard went into the courtroom and batted her eyelashes at the old fool of a judge and he fell for it. Some of the picture evidence provided in support of the "wife beating" was truly laughable and some of the things she said were just fantastical and completely contradictory. In some instances she says he walks out and she won't see him for days after she got mad at him and in the next sentence she's saying he punched her in the back of the head multiple times though she didn't go for any medical exams, made no police reports and took no pictures which showed any significant pictures. That our justice system didn't allow any of this evidence to be shown and tested in open court is a huge shortcoming, that Heard could, ostensibly, bewitch the old male judge with a smile and a few eyelash flutters is another huge shortcoming. The case was, of course not the same parties, yet the evidence was absolutely relevant to determining the truth of the statement that labelled him a "wife beater".
Also, Camile Vasquez is an absolute star. The way she methodically tears Heard's testimony to shreds over the 90 minute session is truly a sight to behold. My wife and I have been watching all of the sessions on YouTube and it's properly compulsive viewing. I'm also shocked that the advice to Heard wasn't to settle because there's no doubt that this trial did her more reputational harm than a settlement would have done. The lawyers got that wrong but it may have been the case that she didn't want to in which case they should have refused the case.
All in all, if anyone hasn't watched it they absolutely should. The Depp legal team give a master class in presenting an evidence based case, retaining the services of true experts in their fields as witnesses and trial lawyers that are among the best in their field at extracting the truth from opposition witnesses.
1. The low hanging fruit.
Make it clear that the Treasury will not indemnify the BOE's pointless sales of bonds at a loss. Thats about a £100bn back in the Treasury's coffers.
2. Serious and sustained cuts to levels of administrative staffing in public bodies, and dissolution of as many of them as possible. The ONS just threatended strike action for being asked to work two days in the office ffs. Piss off. At least 10% to go. Supported by simplification of the tax system - ditch VED and put it on fuel - lose a whole department.
3. Massive reform of energy to increase supply and drive down the cost
This is absolutely key to a successful economy. Emergency planning granted to power generation schemes like energy from waste plants. Investment in tidal. Small nuclear reactors yes, but nix the huge nuclear white elephant plants if losses there can still be cut. Massive investment in UK grid capacity, made by savings from stopping interconnector projects linking us to the EU. Ending Government-funded smart meter rollout. Oil exploration to be classed as a tax-deductable investment. Fracking ban lifted.
4. A new Net Zero policy
Get Net Zero out of the energy and farming, and give it its own department, the department for The Environment and Climate Optimisation. This department to foster creative ways to get to Net Zero and/or cool the climate that do not involve destructive decarbonisation only for such activity to appear elsewhere in countries that don't give a fuck - for example, shutting down our last blast furnace only to have a huge blast furnace built in India to make up for lost capacity. Capacity for virgin steel re-established in the UK, using coking cole from our own Cumbrian coalmine.
5. Agriculture
A new agriculture incentive scheme to incentivise the growing and rearing of more healthy British food, rather than the shut down of the industry in favour of very dubious 'rewilding' initiatives, and crappy solar farms.
How will this do for starters?
https://youtu.be/Sz66zinWXOg
I didn't watch live as Cooking lunch and watching the FA Cup QF.
The summary:
Lots of Tory bashing, Labour and SNP barely mentioned.
Differentiating points from Labour (as requested by @NickPalmer):
Commitment to electoral reform, specifically PR
Lots on countryside issues and sewage, NHS and Social Care.
No rowing back on commitments to green the economy
A commitment to rejoin the Single Market as part of a path back "to the heart of Europe", though Rejoin EU not specifically mentioned, though implied.
Frozen Russian assets to be handed over to Ukraine.
Commitment to reverse Tory cuts in Army numbers (didn't mention RN or RAF)
Call for immediate bilateral ceasefire in Gaza with release of hostages and immediate humanitarian aid.
Commitment to recognise Palestine immediately as a Sovereign State.
No mention of taxes or triple lock etc.
Clear Blue Wall 50 seat strategy, as well as gaining local councils via grass root campaigning.
So overall, pitching a bit to the left of Starmer, particularly on issues like green policy and Gaza that are splitting some from Labour.
https://youtube.com/shorts/g1GK1EOk9Zo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-68413510
And the king they kindly bestowed on the rest of us was one of the worst.
I'd heartily approve of 2, but you will find that it will save very little money. The civil service is small, and not particularly well paid.
I fully approve of easing up the planning process for energy. However, it is very important to make sure that externalities are properly priced. If you build a new coal fired power plant, and it generates cheap electricity, but also increases asthma levels in the local community, have you actually saved money?
I'm also not sure you're right on point 1. It doesn't contribute to the current budget deficit, it does however count towards the overall figure as it's oddly stuck in the "investment" column because the mechanism is recapitalisation of the BoE. Iirc next year ~£30bn is pencilled in as net "investment" for the indemnity but I'm very much out of the game now so could be wrong on the exact number.
https://twitter.com/StokeyyG2/status/1769450637895356786
https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1769456548261294331?s=20
"Trump endorsed anti-LGBTQ Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says his secret profile seeking gay sex that was discovered by AP was just a “prank.”..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvczSLC0vqk
Other accusations were made, including by women who were underage girls at the time.
I do think that concerning waste from energy plants, there's a lot of nimbyism and it's a shame that this wasn't pushed through as emergency legislation when the energy crisis first came about.
Seriously...
The truth is the public sector is struggling to recruit because of the chronic under-employment problem compounded by the fact they can't be competitive in terms of wages.
I'm also puzzled why our recent "Must be more skilled than Linus Torvalds" job advert which offered almost as much pay as a till assistant in Lidl had no applicants.
It's a puzzle.
But that would take (drum roll) investment overs decade to achieve.
A shorter version at around 30 mins, summarising the treatise and putting it in context by Justin Sledge is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkAbfABZOwA&t=0s
Like everything else, it's entirely logical, perfectly reasonable given the times, and utterly, utterly insane...
Second place are the Communists, 'The only real Kremlin critics are either in exile, in jail, or are now dead.
Communist Nikolai Kharitonov is on course for 4.6-4.7% of the vote according to the two exit polls.
Deputy parliamentary speaker Vladislav Davankov is projected to win 3.6%-4.2%.
Leonid Slutsky of the nationalist LDPR is set to come fourth with 2.5-3%.
One man who did attract popular support, Boris Nadezhdin, was barred from running a month before the election'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-68536879
We need a fundamental re-think about work and employment and it may be jobs can be deleted from structures but there is a consequence if you want services to be provided at previous levels.
Unfortunately, the paucity of thinking among those who support the Government seems evident as they have only two ideas - one, cut taxes and two, cut them again. I suppose there's also the one about forcing people back to the workplace.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1769343816434139583?s=20
Awful
However I doubt most would support what Sharia law actually means ie including restrictions on the rights of women and homosexuals
(incidentally, are the various police hate crimes registers in the UK publically available? Can I get hold of them?)
“this is the most interesting year in human history, except for all future years”
12:23 pm · 17 Mar 2024
·
https://x.com/sama/status/1769414392251363569?s=20
Uncannily similar to what I said on here a few days ago: the world has never before been this INTERESTING
Brace
Donald Trump clear favourite.
Donald Trump 10/11
Joe Biden 7/4
Pbs like kinabalu who are convinced Trump cant win should lump on Biden at these prices.
This was contrary to the recommendation made by the Judge who reviewed this area of the law a few years ago. Apparently the SNP will get round to considering what to do about hatred of women in 2026. Or, more likely, never.
Three other points to note:
1. You can make reports anonymously.
2. The police have stated that they will investigate every single report, even though they have already said that they will not investigate all burglaries and other crimes.
3. They have already managed to describe what the law says incorrectly.
As with all such laws, the process is the punishment.
But - given 1 and 2 above - it is very easy to see how the law and the police could easily be gummed up and made to look ridiculous. Anonymous allegations of hate crimes against all SNP MSPs and senior police officers, for instance.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-emails-that-show-corbyn-is-running-as-an-independent-p0mt3lx8w
https://twitter.com/_JakubJanda/status/1769350483695522197
We are no fucking “small ex-Soviet satellite”.
We are Czechia, a proud 10-million country whose President does phone calls with President of Taiwan and we just got about a million artillery shells to Ukrainian defenders while Germany and France do a pissing contest over egos.
High staff turnover, limited training, lack of investment in capital equipment and technology, a focus on quantity over quality. These are British problems, not public or private sector problems.
Trump: "[Kim Jung Un] speaks and his people sit-up in attention. I want my people to do the same”
https://twitter.com/robbi_fahey/status/1769318597036314636
Pippa Crerar
@PippaCrerar
·
47m
Rishi Sunak to try to calm Tory jitters this week amid reports of plot to oust him 👇🏼
https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1769463341385228563
It's not to do with Mr Dictator wanting everybody to say they love him at all times, while disposing of a squad of sweaty henchmen who'll garotte whoever doesn't.
For what it's worth, reported turnout will probably be a few % up on the 65% (2012) and 68% (2018).
Usually involving a window.
ISTR a Master of Trinity saying something similar about his term of mastership.
AI = the real Fall. That's if it succeeds. "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" as B F Skinner put it.
Meanwhile, man posts tweet and man posts one-liner to web forum. Perhaps half the fall has happened already. I don't know whether you saw that public discussion between Elon Musk and Benyamin Netanyahu. They had a laugh recognising that the near-universal carrying of smartphones has gone a long way towards the famed fudging of the brain-computer interface already.
Low productivity in the private sector (which is not at a comparable level) is at least partly down to the ready availability of imported labour, plus I suppose the tendency, reinforced by the tax system, to want fast returns, discouraging longer term investment.
You need to learn the subjunctive.
Count the letters.
"As concerns Mr Navalny. Yes, he passed away. This is always a tragic event, but there were other events when people in prison died. Hasn't that happened in the US? Of course it has"
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1769474710033551836