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This reminds me of some Corbynites – politicalbetting.com
This reminds me of some Corbynites – politicalbetting.com
Trump-endorsed GOP Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says moderate Republicans shouldn't vote for him: They have a choice on the other side pic.twitter.com/WWFrmXwve6
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I must admit I'm confused by the idea that leaving the EU would have any significant impact on economic growth.
As a business owner, there are some tiny positives and some tiny negatives, but the reality is that we could always sell to anyone in the world, and we can always buy from anyone in the world. Tariffs are no different for selling to the EU as previously, and paperwork is very mildly worse.
Of course, as most exports from the UK are services anyway, the impact is essentially negligible, especially as most EU countries have implemented legislation to allow cross recognition of professional standards.
What is the mechanism by which EU membership is supposed to either massively boost or massively hinder economic growth?
The big issues companies (and economies face) is the availability of skilled employees, tax and benefits systems. Almost all of those are national competences. Hence the fact that some EU countries have done pretty well, and some have not.
We did better than the EU when we were members, largely because we had a great legal system, were open to inward investment, speak English, and have a flexible labour market.
On the other hand, we have an economy dominated by consumption, due to insufficient household savings. And that number is entirely due to UK government policies.
I support Brexit because I think it's better that decisions are taken closer to people, and Brexit allows that. I support because small and nimble is usually best. I regret the lack of FoM, which has made sourcing skilled engineers slightly harder. But I also recognize that the UK benefits system is essentially incompatible with FoM. I am not displeased to have avoided EU AI regulation, but I also know a couple of European companies that are doing some amazing work there, especially in the medical space, so I doubt it'll have as much effect as people think.
I regret that people have become so wedded to their views that they are unwilling to recognize that almost everything contains positives and negatives. And that those calculations will be different to individual people.
Most of all, I regret that people think Brexit is a cure all for problems that are essentially domestic: our insufficient household savings rate that causes our trade deficit, our inability to free up building regulation, our tax and benefits system that discourage lower skilled workers from finding employment, and most of all a vocational education system that is a pale shadow of those in Germany, Switzerland or Denmark.
I can be argued that leaving the EU has made it easier for those issues to be solved. Perhaps. But they are not being, perhaps because of the central conceit that they were caused by the EU, not ourselves, is not being addressed.
It is always easier to blame others than to blame ourselves.
Good comment from OGH-Minor. *
* We need a new nickname
Your point about domestic savings rates being too low for a successful balance of trade is one that you have made often, and I am not sure I understand it fully. Doesn't home ownership function as a savings account? You put pots of money in every month and it stores your money without you being able to access it. I would have thought (as is the more conventional mindset) that we are just consuming a lot of foreign things rather than British ones. A look at the list of how many big brands are British-owned (it ain't a long one) seems to be evidence of this, but perhaps that's coincidental?
Incidentally, I see he’s now saying he has all the money he needs to pay the bond to appeal the fine, because he had the cash. Which has absolutely kneecapped his lawyers who were arguing the bond should be waived because he didn’t have the cash…
The baseline for a change is the delta between when the change seemed unlikely to when the change has happened.
Investors in Trump Media & Technology Group are buying shares in a fledgling social media business that booked $3.3 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2023, according to a regulatory filing.
Trump Media is hemorrhaging money, with its losses mounting to $49 million during that same period last year.
I agree though that Brexit has been a monumental distraction from addressing the real failings of our country, stretching now into wasting a further decade in Pooterish self indulgent twaddle. I will be delighted when it is reversed, but don't expect an immediate magical economic boost from it.
Brexit is regretted by the majority of British people, and there is a clear preference to Rejoin, with only a small minority thinking it a success. It is nearly universally seen as a Tory project and failure so is substantially tarnishing the party. You can't polish a turd, particularly when you are Rishi Sunak.
That doesn't mean our first post Brexit government can, should or will be perfect, of course that's not the case. Nor will the second or third. But we as voters can hold our elected politicians to account and kick them out when they fail, no hiding spaces.
Don't let me forget.
Those at the top of the pyramid make money. Those below, not so much.
As long as there's enough mugs, pyramid schemes can last long enough to make those at the top a lot of money.
Bitcoin has been doing this for many years now despite the lack of any material revenue and the extreme costs and losses it makes.
But actually, that makes @kamski 's question even more pertinent.
It's always someone else's fault, and unless we totally disconnect from the world, there will always be someone else to blame.
I do hope the approx 40% of Republicans who seem to have misgivings about their party being taken over by a bunch of corrupt, incompetent and not very intelligent fascists WHO USE THE CAPS KEY FAR TOO MUCH agree with him.
A Democrat two thirds majority in the House and Senate along with control of the Presidency would have its drawbacks but it would at least allow for some rather overdue changes.
But you only have to look at the types who lined up to vote for it to assess the worth of the project.
I’m still fucking livid I’ve lost my EU citizenship. I’m still fucking livid I’ve lost my FoM. I’m still fucking livid that the Tory EU-phobic psychodrama has turned me into a second class citizen on my own continent. I’m fucking livid that it has reduced the Tory Party to the fucking right-wing culture war mess it is, and the baleful impact that has had on this country with policies designed to appeal to the basest impulses of the worst part of our population.
The main impact for me isn’t the economic impact - and though I don’t pretend to understand economics the most superficial google will bring you up reams of analysis of the massively detrimental impact of leaving the EU, particularly on small and medium businesses - including musicians who contribute so much to our economy - thanks in large part to new paperwork whose impact seems to be much larger than ‘very mildly worse’.
I’m fucking livid that really, Brexit isn’t about economics. It’s a project designed to make us a more Conservative country, a more right-wing country. A smaller state country. That’s what its funders want, that’s what the Tories want. They sold Brexit on a pack of lies, on mutually exclusive torrents of horseshit, and by tipping a nod and a wink to the most reactionary parts of this country that all their prayers would be answered. And your ‘regret’, quite frankly, boils my piss.
It wasn’t the possibility of Brexit that impacted free trade. It was Brexit.
We need to save more, invest more, borrow less, reduce our consumption to what we earn and address policies that encourage the use of poorly paid, inefficient labour rather than drive productivity up. These are all domestic issues. It’s time our politicians started focusing on them.
One can be small and nimble within the EU, while benefiting from a large free trade zone and stability.
One thing the UK became very good at was logistics, and as the English-speaking bit of Europe that meant we were trade central. The active word being were.
Paperwork - even where there still are zero tariffs - is massive as you have to categorise everything and prove it. As opposed to before where there was no paperwork. And trade central? Less so. Tariffs absolutely exist if you import something to/from the EU and then to/from the EU. Which is why our bridgehead role has now gone to Rotterdam and why Ireland bypasses us completely.
The solution for most companies who import and export has been to utterly remake their supply chain. Either stop importing or exporting because no longer commercially viable. Or register in the UK/EU depending on the predominant flow and move operations.
“Very mildly worse” indeed. Easy to say from America.
F1: watched qualifying, but it'll be a long while before the markets are there so I'll likely post the pre-race waffle in the afternoon. If I remember...
You've put an 'l' instead of an 'n' so it reads 'a cult takes over.'
Secondly, because of that, inevitably, the blame has just shifted. Brexit true believers or those so politically tied to it they can't admit it's been crap blame 'Remoaners', 'The Blob', the EU (still) and now the European Court of Human Rights - settled on as the latest bogeyman. While Remainers can blame Brexit and the uselessness of Brexiteers and imagine a land of milk and honey upon rejoining and kicking them out of office.
Take the immigration debate - it's quite obviously not resulted in it being addressed in a grown up way, with trade offs explained to the electorate, and with politicians working to find the most practical ways to stop undocumented crossings. Rather we've got exactly the same blame game but even more stupid and farcical than it was in the EU because there's no immediate requirement to make rhetoric work with partner nations.
@RochdalePioneers (a Brexiter) has given us chapter and verse about some of the economic hurdles now in place. Two anecdotally and trivially from me are movements of horses to and from the EU and a very small luxury clothing business which now finds it too expensive to import from the EU.
But more important wrt the "decisions made closer to home" bullshit (soz) is that, in the words of that noble and fearless Brexiter David Davis, we were always s*v*r**gn. The tiniest number of things were subject to EU lawmaking (VAT on home energy and Droit de Suite for example and you have no idea what one of those is).
You guys keep bleating on about shoulda woulda coulda but you sound like all those mad communists still agitating for that system. A great idea just that no one has done it right.
An individual or a nation can always do what it likes as long as it doesn't care about the response of other people or nations.
But if that response does matter, then there are constraints. That might be "stiff me once and I won't trust you again", or "behave too badly and I won't be your ally". But not even an island is a complete island.
There are also, bluntly, the constraints of physics, chemistry and arithmetic. The will of the people can be to cut taxes and increase public spending and that can be popular and seem to work for a decade or two until it doesn't...
The problems of our time: ageing demographics, climate change, mass migration, globalisation of trade, off-shoring of profits to avoid tax, Woke AI killer robots controlled by aliens etc are all issues that need international co-operation and solutions. This particularly is needed between the like-minded mature economies and liberal democracies that are our neighbours on this continent.
The idea politicians falsely blaming the EU for things they were getting wrong, failing to address, or just wouldn't for fear of vested interests would suddenly say 'fair cop' when it was gone rather than find new scapegoats to exculpate themselves, goes against everything we know of human nature.
I always was, and always will be as far as I can see, a European! Since we have left the EU everybody, I know who has any sort of dealings with Europe has found life a great deal more difficult.
Surely the whole point in sovereignty was that we make our own decisions? We all accept we have done so. Now consider the decisions we have made. A few examples of the UK being utterly incompetent and idiotic:
Ditching CE for UKCA at enormous cost to business and industry. But doing so in such an incompetent manner that we go back to CE.
Imposing what Brexit Opportunities Minister Rees-Mogg described as “an act of national self-harm”. Comedy as we insist the EEA treat us as a 3rd country without knowing what that means, then objecting to them imposing our deal which we required them to be treaty-bound to impose, now we ramp up requirements on things like meat imports whilst still not actually having the facilities or staff or computer system or inclination to actually bother ourselves.
If this is sovereignty then you have to question why we bothered. We are sovereign. And get ordered around by the EU countries imposing on us our trade-restricting deal we can’t impose on them cos incompetent.
The will of the people is pretty clearly that this isn't going well and is probably a mistake. There's not much enthusiasm for any alternative but the status quo is seen as rubbish. The only useful questions are what the British state does with that information and when?
But as I recall we had General Elections when we were in the EU. We always had democracy and could hold our politicians to account.
The problem is not that politicians promise castles on clouds, its that the voters demand them. We no longer have politicians who are willing to lead and persuade, just a bunch of shallow Populists spouting incoherent drivel to the hard of thinking.
Apart from that...
It is now two to one on that the cull will exceed 200.
I think it's only fair for me to say this as I am someone who has been very clear that the Brexit we chose to pursue was insane. I still hold that view but I am less persuaded than I was that Brexit in and of itself was a bad idea. My experience tells me there probably was a way to make it a success. But that collapsed as an option as soon as the government decided to go for a maximalist approach to sovereignty. It is going to take many years for us to recover from that blinkered act of self-harm.
In all the Democrats hold eight Senate seats in this cycle where the PVI favours the Republicans.
In Benpointer's excellent competition, I predicted a Labour Majority of 254, which was 54 more than any other entry. I wondered at the time if I had overdone it a bit, but if I could resubmit I would make it more like 452.
As so many on here remarked, Sunak missed his last best chance when he passed over the May election option. It can surely only get worse for him now.
But they're dealing with their Presidential candidate being a criminal, their funds being drained to pay his legal bills, their down ticket candidates having been selected for their desire to destroy American democracy rather than any merits of their own, and all of this being plastered across every media outlet. Plus, all of their major policies are deeply controversial and not liked by swing voters.
We saw in 2022 that these combinations led to the Republicans losing what should have been unloseable races. Georgia and Nevada both spring to mind.
I said two months ago that there might be value in the Dems to hold the senate. I think there still is. Even though there should not be.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/trump-media-reports-loss-on-paltry-sales-with-spac-deadline-near
Essentially worthless on any rational basis.
I owe SeanF too, but he hasn't been posting lately. If someone could give him a nudge?
That continues.
It probably also cost us at least one EV factory (Tesla), and perhaps done battery plants, too.
So if the Labour majority is over 280, strictly speaking it's null points for you too. (Though the kudos would be immense of course and Chief Judge TSE might be inclined to award a bonus point maybe?)
I think that's perhaps the reason for your different perceptions.
It's essentially a way of channelling a lot of money to Trump at arms length - and will suck in a lot of suckers as a bonus.
But now you’ve found a way to support a Labour government doing Brexity things instead of finding fault with anything a rival came up with.
2) it may be the future of alt-right social media in the US. A group of people who have demonstrated they will buy anything and have quite a bit of money to do it with. That’s an interesting customer list….
Graphic novel about dictator's book bans in 1980s Korea faces restrictions in 2020s America
..Set in 1983, three years after the Gwangju Massacre, the events of the story seem like an ugly, distant past, but "Banned Book Club" is one of many titles facing a flood of requests in the present day to be banned from a handful of libraries and schools across the U.S.
"Korean history is being banned in America!" Estrada warned in a summary of the situation.
He pointed out that it's not just this title that has faced these bans. "Grass," a story about World War II sex slavery by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, faced a ban in a school district in Missouri. "The Color of Earth," a coming-of-age story set in a small Korean village in the late 1800s by Dong Hwa Kim, was banned in a school district in Florida...
Good morning
You all know my views on this, resolutely stated over the past couple of years. So I’ll punt for the number of Cons MPs to be 80-130 after the GE, which equates to I don’t know what in terms of a Labour majority. I guess around 250?
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/22/senate-tees-up-final-passage-vote-for-1-2t-funding-package-00148695
The GOP House has spent best part of a year in futile grandstanding.
I promise to be insufferable.
I mean, I know I’m keen on the notion of a sizeable Labour majority but that’s, erm, bold
It’s likely to be total bollocks of course, but that’s what they’re saying.
Now he's contemplating permanent self-exile.
At this juncture a Labour landslide looks more probable, but I'm stubborn.
The biggest institutional investor in the SPAC that’s merging with Truth Social is Susquehanna International Group LLP, which was co-founded by GOP megadonor Jeffrey Yass.
The deal is poised to give Donald Trump a massive financial lifeline.
https://twitter.com/CREWcrew/status/1771225541254787535
Topping was on here predicting the othert day that Sunak will hold on until Jan 2025. If he's right, zero is a very plausible number.
So Trump now claims to have $500m in cash at the end of the same week his lawyers said producing a bond for $454m was "impossible". What a complete idiot. And, as for the idea that he was going to spend his own money on his reelection campaign instead of other peoples, well, words fail me.
Well, there’s a part of me which would love it just for the kicking it will give a Gov’t and party which I think deserve everything coming to them.
However, I do feel that our democratic process needs an effective Opposition in parliament? Starmer in this regard is probably a lot more trustworthy than Blair, who was smug even before he was elected.
That is where the $6bn figure comes from and it’s why the valuation makes no sense.
Although with $300m in cash it’s got enough cash to cover its $50m or if costs.
Has there ever been a modern legislature so unconcerned with legislating?
1) he was warned, specifically
2) multiple ISIS small attacks were foiled recently in Russia
3) he publicly rejected the warning
4) part of the whole strongman schtick it that “this doesn’t happen if I am in charge”
I feel a tad miffed as I’ve been stating on here for a couple of years that I believe the number of Cons MPs will be around 100-150. Not that this is a done deal yet by any means. There’s still a long way to go and every leftie will be told the tale of 1992.
If it happens I will have to ride @Peter_the_Punter ’s coronation train with vicarious satisfaction.
On which topic next PM Penny Mordaunt is this morning showing she’s a serious politician for serious times:
https://x.com/pennymordaunt/status/1771168462267691183?s=46