I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Former French President Francois Hollande was interviewed on Sky yesterday and affirmed that there is no way the EU will reopen negotiations for UK to rejoin
This is the point for those who want to rejoin, the EU doesn't want us back
I think they would ultimately allow us to rejoin. The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I can see EEA membership but not rejoin, but I wonder what a rejoin referendum result would be. That would be the way to do it. Follow the Brexit precedent.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
The political problem for the country is that the Tories did this without being honest about it, and without making the case to the public about why it should be supported. Instead they trumpeted tax cuts and futile attempts to compensate people for inflation.
It's impossible to have any meaningful political debate in the context of such fundamental dishonesty. I think that the government was largely right to spend a lot of money supporting the economy through the pandemic, but it now needs to be paid for.
Starmer and Reeves have not done as good a job as Cameron and Osborne did in laying the blame for the current situation at the feet of three government, or preparing the ground for unpleasant choices to come. They will come a cropper as a result if they don't rapidly turn that around in year one of their government.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Former French President Francois Hollande was interviewed on Sky yesterday and affirmed that there is no way the EU will reopen negotiations for UK to rejoin
This is the point for those who want to rejoin, the EU doesn't want us back
Sure, it's a long road back, and the best approach is the LD one of rejoining slowly by individual measure and programme. There is a need to establish positive relations before any formal bid to Rejoin can be started.
The obliteration of the Tory party will help improve relations in itself.
Mr. Jonathan, depends on the terms. A Ctrl+Z undo type rejoin would be way easier than the probable new terms (Schengen opt-out would likely remain, but contributions would be without a rebate and the path to Euro membership, or even joining ASAP would be likely involved).
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
Mr. Jonathan, depends on the terms. A Ctrl+Z undo type rejoin would be way easier than the probable new terms (Schengen opt-out would likely remain, but contributions would be without a rebate and the path to Euro membership, or even joining ASAP would be likely involved).
The Brexit precedent was establish the mandate to rejoin first and then negotiate the details.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
Mr. Jonathan, it'd be different rejoining, however, because that would require the EU to also be in favour, and they would, presumably, need to know what they'd be in favour of.
I do agree with what I think you're implying, namely that a concrete approach should've been taken by the official Leave campaign for the sake of clarity, but there we are.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Former French President Francois Hollande was interviewed on Sky yesterday and affirmed that there is no way the EU will reopen negotiations for UK to rejoin
This is the point for those who want to rejoin, the EU doesn't want us back
I think they would ultimately allow us to rejoin. The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
It's a case of timing isn't it? The EU will not just open negotiations if a British government demands it because we think we screwed up and have changed our mind. For the obvious reasons that they have other priorities and the decision to Brexit itself showed an unreliability as a partner in the project.
However, there will be various points in the future where the EU is undergoing a reform and/or enlargement - notably perhaps around security - in which the UK may well be seen as a desirable partner to have involved that may offer an opportunity to de facto rejoin via important structures (and eventually fully do so). If the settled view of the country is still, as it is now, that Brexit was a disastrous folly, then any government that isn't in fierce ideological opposition will look to do so.
Mr. Jonathan, it'd be different rejoining, however, because that would require the EU to also be in favour, and they would, presumably, need to know what they'd be in favour of.
I do agree with what I think you're implying, namely that a concrete approach should've been taken by the official Leave campaign for the sake of clarity, but there we are.
Mr. Jonathan, depends on the terms. A Ctrl+Z undo type rejoin would be way easier than the probable new terms (Schengen opt-out would likely remain, but contributions would be without a rebate and the path to Euro membership, or even joining ASAP would be likely involved).
The Brexit precedent was establish the mandate to rejoin first and then negotiate the details.
True but the Brexit precedent shows we need to do better than that.
What public services do the Tories plan to cut to fund the gaps on their own spending plans?
Spending plans which, as always, assume fuel duty will be unfrozen (yeah right).
The Tories are an entirely known entity. There will be a tax threshold freeze and spending restraint in pay and in CSR.
Labour are not.
The Tories may be many things, but an entirely known entity is definitively not one of them.
I don't think that's true. I think it's pretty clear what they'd do, fiscally, over another 5-year term: I'd expect the tax threshold freeze to end and the structural deficit to be eliminated.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
Ah the dreamy days of the continent is cut off without us.
Why is it you never ask if the EU wants the UK back ? All evidence suggests they had enough and rejoining is not on the cards. Well not unless PM Farage can call in a favour from Giorgia Meloni.
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
The Euro and Schengen are the two best bits. Being in the EU with all the shite but missing out on the benefits - no wonder we voted to leave.
What public services do the Tories plan to cut to fund the gaps on their own spending plans?
Spending plans which, as always, assume fuel duty will be unfrozen (yeah right).
The Tories are an entirely known entity. There will be a tax threshold freeze and spending restraint in pay and in CSR.
Labour are not.
The Tories may be many things, but an entirely known entity is definitively not one of them.
I don't think that's true. I think it's pretty clear what they'd do, fiscally, over another 5-year term: I'd expect the tax threshold freeze to end and the structural deficit to be eliminated.
Tell that to the non doms. For years it would be complete disaster to tax them and wouldn't raise any money anyway. Then......
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
I have been trying to book a GP appointment for my son for the last 45 mins. Online system has stopped taking appointments and the phone just keeps on ringing. This is what folks face everyday thanks to the Tories.
The usual right-wing fruit loops on here will continue to pretend there is nothing wrong and still put the x against the Conservatives. I actually pity them as they obviously need some kind of help. At least one of this group, @Leon has called a spade a spade and wants the Tories destroyed. His reasoning is wrong, immigration is not the main issue, it’s the fact that the Tories have completely and utterly Ratnered this country over the last 14 years.
Hopefully they will end up with less 15 seats but my betting position is 100-150 seats.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
Total airy-fairy nonsense. With the exception of 'No new IT projects' those are all on a par with Sunak's 'cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion'. Taking Quangos for example, you need to list all the quangos that are going to be cut, how much each will save, and what, if any, downsides there are.
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
I didn’t say that fresh terms couldn’t garner a majority simply that it wasn’t a given. I do think a lot of those in favour of rejoining operate on the assumption that it would be essentially turning the clock back, that to me at least kind of implies an underlying assumption that you rejoin exactly as you left. Obviously there will be subtle differences within the grouping. Whilst we were still members there were those who wanted us to join the Euro and abandon opt outs etc.
I voted Remain not because I thought brexit intrinsically bad, but because I suspected it would be harder to achieve than leading Brexiteers were willing to accept. I would start from a position of rejecting rejoin because likewise I think it’s trickier than is being assumed.
The opinions of a single aged French political has been are totally irrelevant. Recent opinion poll of the German population showed that the Germans are strongly in favour of the UK rejoining the EU.
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
Ah the dreamy days of the continent is cut off without us.
Why is it you never ask if the EU wants the UK back ? All evidence suggests they had enough and rejoining is not on the cards. Well not unless PM Farage can call in a favour from Giorgia Meloni.
You asked this question ten short minutes after Ben addressed exactly that question.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
@ConnorGillies Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has called an emergency press conference to deliver an ‘announcement’ regarding the general election.
I have been trying to book a GP appointment for my son for the last 45 mins. Online system has stopped taking appointments and the phone just keeps on ringing. This is what folks face everyday thanks to the Tories.
The usual right-wing fruit loops on here will continue to pretend there is nothing wrong and still put the x against the Conservatives. I actually pity them as they obviously need some kind of help. At least one of this group, @Leon has called a spade a spade and wants the Tories destroyed. His reasoning is wrong, immigration is not the main issue, it’s the fact that the Tories have completely and utterly Ratnered this country over the last 14 years.
Hopefully they will end up with less 15 seats but my betting position is 100-150 seats.
Brilliantly put and understood by 95% of British people but about 50% of political betting users
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Former French President Francois Hollande was interviewed on Sky yesterday and affirmed that there is no way the EU will reopen negotiations for UK to rejoin
This is the point for those who want to rejoin, the EU doesn't want us back
I think they would ultimately allow us to rejoin. The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
The only terms that might get past the rest of Europe are simple. Join under the current rules as a new entrant.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
I think maybe 'taken a hell of a dunt' = 'been totally destroyed', and 'take quite some time' = 'never'.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
Total airy-fairy nonsense. With the exception of 'No new IT projects' those are all on a par with Sunak's 'cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion'. Taking Quangos for example, you need to list all the quangos that are going to be cut, how much each will save, and what, if any, downsides there are.
Mythical vague reform and efficiencies, especially many promised before, will save us!
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/05/byron-donalds-nostalgia-jim-crow-00161786 ...“During Jim Crow the Black family was together,” Donalds said during a Black GOP outreach event in a gentrifying part of Philadelphia on Tuesday, and criticized decades-old policies from former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson for promoting a culture of dependence. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were — not just conservative, because Black people always have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”..
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Put another way, the Tories were fine until they ran into problems - as every single government does. When they did they did not have the ability to deal with them in the ways the would have done in the past because ideology had become more important than pragmatism. That made rejecting the rule of law more important than accepting it. Sunak made Suella Braverman Home Secretary. He did so because he felt he had no choice not because she was even remotely capable of doing the job.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
You say the energy price cap was bad - but the alternative would have been soaring bills anyway, so people would have been worse off either way. The alternative to a cap was just letting the worst off default on their bills, more energy companies going bust and people having their electricity turned off?
The reason that this is clearly a Tory issue is that they had Treasury brain - so the benefits of spending if too intangible are just ignored. Infrastructure spending would increase economic growth, productivity, general health, etc etc. which would grow the economy. All Treasury sees is spending. This mindset needs to end.
I have been trying to book a GP appointment for my son for the last 45 mins. Online system has stopped taking appointments and the phone just keeps on ringing. This is what folks face everyday thanks to the Tories.
The usual right-wing fruit loops on here will continue to pretend there is nothing wrong and still put the x against the Conservatives. I actually pity them as they obviously need some kind of help. At least one of this group, @Leon has called a spade a spade and wants the Tories destroyed. His reasoning is wrong, immigration is not the main issue, it’s the fact that the Tories have completely and utterly Ratnered this country over the last 14 years.
Hopefully they will end up with less 15 seats but my betting position is 100-150 seats.
Yeah - the daily interactions people have with services, whether that's health, education, policing, etc. are much worse than 10 - 15 years ago. The Tories oversaw and are responsible for that.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
You say the energy price cap was bad - but the alternative would have been soaring bills anyway, so people would have been worse off either way. The alternative to a cap was just letting the worst off default on their bills, more energy companies going bust and people having their electricity turned off?
The reason that this is clearly a Tory issue is that they had Treasury brain - so the benefits of spending if too intangible are just ignored. Infrastructure spending would increase economic growth, productivity, general health, etc etc. which would grow the economy. All Treasury sees is spending. This mindset needs to end.
There would have been a customer payment strike when bills hit £5k per year, even the ones who could afford it would simply not pay and ramp up pressure on the government, something similar, and of the same order of magnitude of cost, was inevitable.
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
Ah the dreamy days of the continent is cut off without us.
Why is it you never ask if the EU wants the UK back ? All evidence suggests they had enough and rejoining is not on the cards. Well not unless PM Farage can call in a favour from Giorgia Meloni.
Please keep hammering that point, Alan, again and again. I get tired of doing so.
There isn't a snowball in hell's chance of them having us back, and with good reason. Talk of rejoining is therefore poppycock. Why would anybody even raise it?
There are fewer more pro-EU posters on this site than me, and even I wouldn't support rejoining, not least because I am a believer in the idea that if you make the bed, you should lie in it. More kindly put, that means that we voted democratically to join and should abide by that decision, even if people like me think it was dumb. But since they won't have us back anyway, we don't even have to discuss it.
That doesn't mean we should develop a more constructive relationship with the EU. That's just common sense. I expect the EU would be up for that too, not least because they were partly to bame for the disater that was Brexit. But rejoin? That's fairyland, and nobody should think otherwise.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
Total airy-fairy nonsense. With the exception of 'No new IT projects' those are all on a par with Sunak's 'cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion'. Taking Quangos for example, you need to list all the quangos that are going to be cut, how much each will save, and what, if any, downsides there are.
Mythical vague reform and efficiencies, especially many promised before, will save us!
"Nigel Farage may be about to pull off a once-in-a-century political realignment
We could be just days away from a tipping point in the polls when Reform overtakes the Conservatives"
"Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party."
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
Ah the dreamy days of the continent is cut off without us.
Why is it you never ask if the EU wants the UK back ? All evidence suggests they had enough and rejoining is not on the cards. Well not unless PM Farage can call in a favour from Giorgia Meloni.
Right now, I think the EU has no serious interest in us rejoining, just as we have no serious interest in rejoining it. But things change over time. We weren't wanted in the EEC in 1963, but we did join in 1973, for example. 20 years of less antagonistic interactions plus fixing the worst of the economic barriers we saddled ourselves with, accepted as normal by both major parties here, and things might look different to both us and the EU. Or we might find we've got somewhere good enough and stay there. Or the EU might itself have changed in some hard to foresee ways. The future is hard to predict...
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
I don't think either of those statements is true.
I don't think we would rejoin on the same terms.
I don't think different terms can never have majority support.
Agreed. I think we would have to join the Euro and Schengen. I doubt the country's ready for that yet but in 20 years time maybe?
Ah the dreamy days of the continent is cut off without us.
Why is it you never ask if the EU wants the UK back ? All evidence suggests they had enough and rejoining is not on the cards. Well not unless PM Farage can call in a favour from Giorgia Meloni.
We're agreed though, shirley? In 20 years time ≠ 'on the cards'.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Former French President Francois Hollande was interviewed on Sky yesterday and affirmed that there is no way the EU will reopen negotiations for UK to rejoin
This is the point for those who want to rejoin, the EU doesn't want us back
I think they would ultimately allow us to rejoin. The problem with rejoiner faction is their underlying assumption that we can rejoin on exactly the same terms as we left. That is never going to happen, and the terms we would get might not be ones that a majority would want to agree to.
The only terms that might get past the rest of Europe are simple. Join under the current rules as a new entrant.
Looking at Reform and Cons polling within 2% of each other (17% and 19% respectively) - what would be a point where between the two of them the showing is relatively good, but both of them collapse in terms of seat numbers due to FPTP? I assume if they both polled equal at ~17% that could potentially stop either party getting any / a significant number of seats. Whilst I am not looking forward to this Labour super majority government, I do feel that the extinction of the Conservative party is a long time coming.
If you’re transiting through LAX, literally 4 hours on a two leg flight booking and (hope to God) not stepping outside the airport, would you apply for an ETSA waiver or a C1 transit visa?
The opinions of a single aged French political has been are totally irrelevant. Recent opinion poll of the German population showed that the Germans are strongly in favour of the UK rejoining the EU.
The EU will not blindly reject a net contributor to the budget given who is on the current provisional membership list. But there would be no going back to what we had before, that is for sure. It's a process from here. We'll just get closer over time and then UK demographics will do the rest. Look at support for rejoining among the under-50s.
"Nigel Farage may be about to pull off a once-in-a-century political realignment
We could be just days away from a tipping point in the polls when Reform overtakes the Conservatives"
"Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party."
Just to be clear, the Tory right, kipper entryists and ex-communists bear none of the responsibility and it is all the fault of Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Rory Stewart. Got it.
@ConnorGillies Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has called an emergency press conference to deliver an ‘announcement’ regarding the general election.
Perhaps the positive predictions for Scottish Conservatives need to be revisited.
It's been very clear for a while that the Conservative vote in Scotland will be down on 2019. Any such "positive" predictions have been based entirely on the idea that the SNP vote looks like it's declining more. The problem has come in people assuming UNS. I don't think I've seen any attempt to analyse where the declines will come. If the Tories lose votes in SNP-Tory seats and SNP holds up, whilst the SNP vote declines in SNP-Lab seats, then you could see the Tories edged out rather than pick up seats.
Now, that's a big if, and I'm not saying it's likely. But the ripple of excitement that came after a poll a few days ago showing the Tories up 3pp was interesting. The 3pp rise was relative to the previous poll, and still showed the Tories losing a quarter of the Scottish vote compared to 2019 (as oppose to 45% of the 2019 vote in the previous poll). These are bad figures, nearly as bad as / worse than the SNP depending on which you pick.
A positive -- in terms of seats -- result for the Tories remains possible even with these Duguid shenanigans, but it's a risky bet.
I have been trying to book a GP appointment for my son for the last 45 mins. Online system has stopped taking appointments and the phone just keeps on ringing. This is what folks face everyday thanks to the Tories.
The usual right-wing fruit loops on here will continue to pretend there is nothing wrong and still put the x against the Conservatives. I actually pity them as they obviously need some kind of help. At least one of this group, @Leon has called a spade a spade and wants the Tories destroyed. His reasoning is wrong, immigration is not the main issue, it’s the fact that the Tories have completely and utterly Ratnered this country over the last 14 years.
Hopefully they will end up with less 15 seats but my betting position is 100-150 seats.
Streetings plan for the Reform of the NHS has more holes in it than Swiss cheese and involves handing more NHS money to profits of private sector.
Such as his donors.
I look forward to you commenting on the improvements in this area 1 year in.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Put another way, the Tories were fine until they ran into problems - as every single government does. When they did they did not have the ability to deal with them in the ways the would have done in the past because ideology had become more important than pragmatism. That made rejecting the rule of law more important than accepting it. Sunak made Suella Braverman Home Secretary. He did so because he felt he had no choice not because she was even remotely capable of doing the job.
If COVID hadn’t happened the Tories would have still run into trouble, Boris’ fantasies would have encountered inconvenient realities eventually.
@ConnorGillies Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has called an emergency press conference to deliver an ‘announcement’ regarding the general election.
Perhaps the positive predictions for Scottish Conservatives need to be revisited.
Indeed rumours that Mr Ross is inserting himself into the seat from which David Duguid was vacated yesterday. If so the Scottish Tories should be comprehensively pulverised.
If you’re transiting through LAX, literally 4 hours on a two leg flight booking and (hope to God) not stepping outside the airport, would you apply for an ETSA waiver or a C1 transit visa?
(Passport all tickety boo and biometric)
Experienced answers appreciated, thanks. xx
It may be tough to get an ESTA as you need to provide an address in the US for your first stay. I am not sure if you can put an airport. But if you can get past that, the ESTA is pretty easy to sort out. I did one the other day and it took a few hours to get after a 15 minute form-filling exercise.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
Total airy-fairy nonsense. With the exception of 'No new IT projects' those are all on a par with Sunak's 'cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion'. Taking Quangos for example, you need to list all the quangos that are going to be cut, how much each will save, and what, if any, downsides there are.
And HS2 has already been cancelled. Though not before we'd incurred most of the expense for none of the benefits.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
We spend about three times that apparently - the last published report only goes to 2020.
@ConnorGillies Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has called an emergency press conference to deliver an ‘announcement’ regarding the general election.
Perhaps the positive predictions for Scottish Conservatives need to be revisited.
Indeed rumours that Mr Ross is inserting himself into the seat from which David Duguid was vacated yesterday. If so the Scottish Tories should be comprehensively pulverised.
That would be a massive own goal. Scottish Tories are doing ok.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Put another way, the Tories were fine until they ran into problems - as every single government does. When they did they did not have the ability to deal with them in the ways the would have done in the past because ideology had become more important than pragmatism. That made rejecting the rule of law more important than accepting it. Sunak made Suella Braverman Home Secretary. He did so because he felt he had no choice not because she was even remotely capable of doing the job.
As noted elsewhere, the Tory Party is a victim of Brexit.
They wholly embraced the idea that wishes were all that mattered. We have had enough of experts, and we can use alternative facts.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
The problem with efficiency savings is that they need to be carefully identified. That takes work and effort and so management tend to just cut blindly, assuming the 'waste' will be the first thing to go in a reduced budget. When applied lazily and haphazardly the cuts tend to just reduce the capacity to deliver whatever the cut service is supposed to deliver. Universities, as talked about on here, are essentially doing this at the moment and it's hollowing out both research and teaching.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
You say the energy price cap was bad - but the alternative would have been soaring bills anyway, so people would have been worse off either way. The alternative to a cap was just letting the worst off default on their bills, more energy companies going bust and people having their electricity turned off?
The reason that this is clearly a Tory issue is that they had Treasury brain - so the benefits of spending if too intangible are just ignored. Infrastructure spending would increase economic growth, productivity, general health, etc etc. which would grow the economy. All Treasury sees is spending. This mindset needs to end.
Like far too much of our expenditure the energy cap was badly directed by being universal. Any government support should have been focused on those in need. The majority should just have grinned and bore it. Instead tens of billions were, once again, chucked on the credit card for our benighted children to pay.
I agree with @Alanbrooke that there must be room for increases in productivity and savings, especially after such a long period of rapid growth in spending, but I also think we need to be much more radical about how we cut current spending, not least to allow us to increase capital spending on infrastructure etc as you point out.
The Universal state pension is, to me, an obvious target. Anyone receiving other income of more than double average earnings, whether because they are still working or because of private or state pensions, should not be receiving it.
We need to make people pay for their care in old age rather than leave hundreds of thousands as inheritance after the State has picked up the tab.
Without fundamental changes like this there is no capacity for the likes of HS2 and therefore few opportunities to encourage future growth.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
We spend about three times that apparently - the last published report only goes to 2020.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
I think maybe 'taken a hell of a dunt' = 'been totally destroyed', and 'take quite some time' = 'never'.
Well, lets see if Labour do any better. I am not holding my breathe.
The opinions of a single aged French political has been are totally irrelevant. Recent opinion poll of the German population showed that the Germans are strongly in favour of the UK rejoining the EU.
The EU will not blindly reject a net contributor to the budget given who is on the current provisional membership list. But there would be no going back to what we had before, that is for sure. It's a process from here. We'll just get closer over time and then UK demographics will do the rest. Look at support for rejoining among the under-50s.
This is the point. It's often claimed that people become more conservative, and thus Conservative, as they age - and maybe so. But what is going to turn the under 50s into Eurosceptics while we are not in the EU? (Hint: nothing)
I would love to see odds on the first by election of the next parliament. I still see Sunak retaining his seat, but come the end of July I do not see him as leader of the Tories. Is he really going to stay an MP for five years in opposition? But it would leave one of the most interesting by election fights in years. A Tory party in turmoil and a Labour party of ‘change’ which has a huge majority. I suspect that both the Lib Dem’s and Reform would fancy it and at the right odds one of them having the constituency MP at Christmas 2024 would be an interesting bet.
I have been trying to book a GP appointment for my son for the last 45 mins. Online system has stopped taking appointments and the phone just keeps on ringing. This is what folks face everyday thanks to the Tories.
The usual right-wing fruit loops on here will continue to pretend there is nothing wrong and still put the x against the Conservatives. I actually pity them as they obviously need some kind of help. At least one of this group, @Leon has called a spade a spade and wants the Tories destroyed. His reasoning is wrong, immigration is not the main issue, it’s the fact that the Tories have completely and utterly Ratnered this country over the last 14 years.
Hopefully they will end up with less 15 seats but my betting position is 100-150 seats.
Streetings plan for the Reform of the NHS has more holes in it than Swiss cheese and involves handing more NHS money to profits of private sector.
Such as his donors.
I look forward to you commenting on the improvements in this area 1 year in.
If he can get rid of the utterly moronic “call at precisely 0800hrs or get to fuck” system that they have currently, he’ll have made massive progress already.
"Nigel Farage may be about to pull off a once-in-a-century political realignment
We could be just days away from a tipping point in the polls when Reform overtakes the Conservatives"
"Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party."
An odd, and untrue argument. An election is about to be won from the centre. The Tory's long term reputation is based on moderation, decency and competence. They win elections on two great foundations: the middle class suburban and rural centre right vote, and winning floating votes from Labour inclined moderates who in a particular moment find the Tories a better option.
A couple of million centre right voters plan to vote Labour this time. How many normally Labour floaters plan to vote Tory? Roughly zero. This is not because the Tories are too centrist or too competent for them.
@Peter_the_Punter strong words. Not in some ways your best if I may say. The ‘make your bed lie in it’ argument is particularly weak.
I would expect us to rejoin eventually, perhaps c. 20 years, maybe less. The economic arguments will be compelling as will freedom of movement.
Agree about the twenty years, though not about the reasoning.
Vibes got us out, and vibes will pull us back in. Nostalgia for a youth of war stories drove Brexit, nostalgia for a youth of school language exchanges is driving the yearning for Brejoin. We're all as irrational as each other.
If Brexit really were brilliant, that could have cemented it, but it isn't. In the meantime, we have to tiptoe round the subject, because otherwise Uncle Nigel will go off on one about how ungrateful the youth of today are after all the sacrifices he made.
"Nigel Farage may be about to pull off a once-in-a-century political realignment
We could be just days away from a tipping point in the polls when Reform overtakes the Conservatives"
"Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party."
On seats though even if Reform are level pegging with the Tories or even slightly ahead of the Tories on voteshare, the Tories still win significantly more seats than Reform, Labour and the LDs however win even more seats with a split right.
Anyway, I suspect his return to leadership was peak Farage in the polls. He will decline as the Starmer v Sunak debates from which he is excluded continue and the Conservatives probably win back a few voters from Reform and the LDs if as is likely the Tory manifesto promises a big IHT cut
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
No new IT projects but productivity improvements - how the f*** does that work....
Thanks for confirming in 1 post my believe that you are absolutely f***ing clueless..
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
That's down to Covid and the interest rate spikes to fight inflation. Don't forget that.
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
The energy cap was another major contributor. Martin Lewis is truly an enemy of the people.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
You say the energy price cap was bad - but the alternative would have been soaring bills anyway, so people would have been worse off either way. The alternative to a cap was just letting the worst off default on their bills, more energy companies going bust and people having their electricity turned off?
The reason that this is clearly a Tory issue is that they had Treasury brain - so the benefits of spending if too intangible are just ignored. Infrastructure spending would increase economic growth, productivity, general health, etc etc. which would grow the economy. All Treasury sees is spending. This mindset needs to end.
Like far too much of our expenditure the energy cap was badly directed by being universal. Any government support should have been focused on those in need. The majority should just have grinned and bore it. Instead tens of billions were, once again, chucked on the credit card for our benighted children to pay.
I agree with @Alanbrooke that there must be room for increases in productivity and savings, especially after such a long period of rapid growth in spending, but I also think we need to be much more radical about how we cut current spending, not least to allow us to increase capital spending on infrastructure etc as you point out.
The Universal state pension is, to me, an obvious target. Anyone receiving other income of more than double average earnings, whether because they are still working or because of private or state pensions, should not be receiving it.
We need to make people pay for their care in old age rather than leave hundreds of thousands as inheritance after the State has picked up the tab.
Without fundamental changes like this there is no capacity for the likes of HS2 and therefore few opportunities to encourage future growth.
Making an emergency payment for soaring prices means tested would a) have slowed down the payments getting to those in need and b) would likely have costed more to administer than would have been saved. Universalisation of such support is typically a cost saver - and any people who really got money they didn't need would have likely spent it back in the economy, boosting growth and being useful.
I don't see cutting things that help those who cannot work (the elderly) as a useful intervention. If anything we need more funding for that kind of work, as supporting those people is itself a job that needs doing and can be a source of pro social work. If you remove support for the elderly, their working age family are the ones who pick up the slack (as I well know) and that itself becomes a drag on productivity.
The UK can afford a robust social safety net system, robust social services, decent healthcare and public transport, without having to pick a group of people to immiserate. The wealth exists, it is in the hands of the exceedingly wealthy. Taxation on wealth and land, on empty or second (or third) homes, on financialised assets that do nothing but breed gold from barren gold - these are the places any sensible government would focus on. You will make the extremely wealthy marginally less wealthy - but not to the point of them being unable to cope.
I think the refusal of both parties to mention the B-word in this campaign - for reasons we’ve gone over before - shames them. History will not judge them kindly.
This election will see the revenge of the 48%. They will swing behind Labour/LD, voting tactically to unseat the Tories. A big chunk of the Brexit true believers, the deluded irreconcilables who think the Tories botched Brexit by not doing it properly, will drink the Reform PLC Kool-Aid.
And that eviscerates the Tories.
That’s what the history books will say, I reckon.
Anyway, the Shrimsley piece tickles my fancy. Here’s the conclusion:
It is just nonsense. The Tories were fine after Brexit and were riding high in the polls. What screwed them was Johnson's COVID shenanigans and the disastrous Truss budget. The Eurofanatics want to blame everything in Brexit. They still can't accept that the UK has had better economic growth and unemploymemt than the EU since we fully Brexited.
Former French President Francois Hollande was interviewed on Sky yesterday and affirmed that there is no way the EU will reopen negotiations for UK to rejoin
This is the point for those who want to rejoin, the EU doesn't want us back
Sure, it's a long road back, and the best approach is the LD one of rejoining slowly by individual measure and programme. There is a need to establish positive relations before any formal bid to Rejoin can be started.
The obliteration of the Tory party will help improve relations in itself.
Ironically he was expressing great concern over the rise in the right across EU and obliterate the conservative party you are left with Farage Reform
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
The problem with efficiency savings is that they need to be carefully identified. That takes work and effort and so management tend to just cut blindly, assuming the 'waste' will be the first thing to go in a reduced budget. When applied lazily and haphazardly the cuts tend to just reduce the capacity to deliver whatever the cut service is supposed to deliver. Universities, as talked about on here, are essentially doing this at the moment and it's hollowing out both research and teaching.
Its worse than that. The typical efficiency saving of the last decade goes something like this:
Organisation cuts headcount, paying out redundancy. Resultant workload pressures lead to experienced staff leave and/or take absence on long term stress. Now with staff shortages they have little choice but to pay 2-3x salary to rehire the same people who have left as contractors. Current salaried workforce get annoyed by the differentials on pay and go on strike, or become contractors themselves.
It just has cost us loads more, hence record investment in NHS but worse service, as one example. If we had seriously budgeted what we need, then paid for it we would be better off now than having a decade of top down austerity (a short burst was needed after the GFC). In parallel we should be working out sustainable ways of reducing costs (i.e. training 2x more doctors an obvious example, using more tech in healthcare another) - but those solutions come along as and when they do, not when politicians decide the budget looks better by reducing departmental budgets by 15% immediately.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
No new IT projects but productivity improvements - how the f*** does that work....
Thanks for confirming in 1 post my believe that you are absolutely f***ing clueless..
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
It is until you realise that Quangos do not burn money for fun. They provide essential services and support in a way designed to limit political interference and improve impartiality. If you take the service inhouse the vast majority of the cost remains and politicians start being accountable for things they really don't have a grip of.
Korea and the U.S. agreed to form the alliance during their dialogue on core emerging technologies in December, and expanded it to include Japan, India and the EU.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
We spend about three times that apparently - the last published report only goes to 2020.
See above comment about HS2 - that falls under the definition.
The £82 billion is fantasy. It's more than we spend on Defence. We spend £100 billion on education. £40 billion on the police. £140 billion on social security for pensioners.
The £82 billion simply describes some public services provided via arms length organisations. And I am a massive fan of such organisations - they have a democratic mandate but avoid all the micro-meddling from politicians and civil servants, with all the confused objectives and values that comes with.
Lothian Buses my special favourite - provide good bus services, do not make an operating loss. Simple. Perfect.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
We spend about three times that apparently - the last published report only goes to 2020.
See above comment about HS2 - that falls under the definition.
The £82 billion is fantasy. It's more than we spend on Defence. We spend £100 billion on education. £40 billion on the police. £140 billion on social security for pensioners.
The £82 billion simply describes some public services provided via arms length organisations. And I am a massive fan of such organisations - they have a democratic mandate but avoid all the micro-meddling from politicians and civil servants. Lothian Buses my special favourite.
I don't like that the last public report into quango finances was in 2020, and that the Cabinet Office can simply hold future ones back. Perhaps we need an OBR style quango for quango finance. QFQF.
@hzeffman Breaking: The Conservatives accepted £5 million from the controversial donor Frank Hester's company in January, new Electoral Commission figures show.
It follows £10 million of donations last year
Perhaps, but Labours going to take £2000 from every voter.
Probably more.
Quite possible, given the precedent our current government has just set.
The average household is paying £3,500 more in tax now than in 2019. The biggest tax raising parliament in UK history.
And I don’t blame the Tories for doing this. They probably should have raised more. Our public infrastructure, services and local government are on their knees after years of no investment.
Or were raising record taxes but spending it on the wrong things.
What would CoE Alanbrooke have stopped spending money on?
Woke diversity consultants in the NHS?
I answered this yesterday - some examples
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at Restructure the BoE debt No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun Reform MoD procurement for more value for money Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
It's extraordinary that after 14 years of Conservative government, we still spend £82 billion on quangos. /s
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
It is until you realise that Quangos do not burn money for fun. They provide essential services and support in a way designed to limit political interference and improve impartiality. If you take the service inhouse the vast majority of the cost remains and politicians start being accountable for things they really don't have a grip of.
The opinions of a single aged French political has been are totally irrelevant. Recent opinion poll of the German population showed that the Germans are strongly in favour of the UK rejoining the EU.
The EU will not blindly reject a net contributor to the budget given who is on the current provisional membership list. But there would be no going back to what we had before, that is for sure. It's a process from here. We'll just get closer over time and then UK demographics will do the rest. Look at support for rejoining among the under-50s.
This is the point. It's often claimed that people become more conservative, and thus Conservative, as they age - and maybe so. But what is going to turn the under 50s into Eurosceptics while we are not in the EU? (Hint: nothing)
Progressivism. Joining a Eurocentric club as we become less and less European will be increasingly toxic to the progressive left.
"Nigel Farage may be about to pull off a once-in-a-century political realignment
We could be just days away from a tipping point in the polls when Reform overtakes the Conservatives"
"Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party."
On seats though even if Reform are level pegging with the Tories or even slightly ahead of the Tories on voteshare, the Tories still win significantly more seats than Reform, Labour and the LDs however win even more seats with a split right.
Anyway, I suspect his return to leadership was peak Farage in the polls. He will decline as the Starmer v Sunak debates from which he is excluded continue and the Conservatives probably win back a few voters from Reform and the LDs if as is likely the Tory manifesto promises a big IHT cut
I don't think IHT is as unpopular as conservatives think it is. One, because most people are already safe from it because who has half a million worth of assets to gift the next generation that they aren't already having to dip into to make ends meet, and two, because it is the very definition of unearned wealth. Income tax bands you can at least go "I work hard for my money, why should it be taxed so high?", with inheritance it's just a case of rich people passing on their money to their kids so they stay rich.
I will probably have to pay some inheritance tax at some point when my grandparents pass away - they are splitting their only asset (their house) between 7 grandkids and my aunt. The house is only worth the ridiculous amount it is because it is within the M25 and the housing market is stupid. If we have to pay some tax - so be it. Again, I'd rather a functioning society than a bit more change in my pocket. The only people who really gripe about it are those who are already wedded to the "no such thing as society" mentality - the extremely wealthy who are all "I've got mine, Jack". If anything I think lots of people would be fine with inheritance tax increasing, especially on estates over £5 or £10 million.
@Peter_the_Punter strong words. Not in some ways your best if I may say. The ‘make your bed lie in it’ argument is particularly weak.
I would expect us to rejoin eventually, perhaps c. 20 years, maybe less. The economic arguments will be compelling as will freedom of movement.
I'm unlikely to be around in 20 years, Heathy, so Brexit is permanent for me. That's an absurdly long time span anyway, even for you young folk.
As for the bed, it's part of being a voter in a democracy. You have to accept responsibility for your decisions if you are to avoid making them frivolously. Those of us who voted remain bear some responsibility for not making a better case. It's not just the fault of those who voted leave, entirely rationally in many instances. We all made the bed. We all have to lie in it, but by all means make it as comfortable as possible now that it is done.
Comments
It's impossible to have any meaningful political debate in the context of such fundamental dishonesty. I think that the government was largely right to spend a lot of money supporting the economy through the pandemic, but it now needs to be paid for.
Starmer and Reeves have not done as good a job as Cameron and Osborne did in laying the blame for the current situation at the feet of three government, or preparing the ground for unpleasant choices to come. They will come a cropper as a result if they don't rapidly turn that around in year one of their government.
The obliteration of the Tory party will help improve relations in itself.
Major cutback on Quangos theres £82billion to go at
Restructure the BoE debt
No new IT projects for the duration of parliament - they always overrun
Reform MoD procurement for more value for money
Restore public sector productivity instead of losing 2% a year
The government spends £1200 billion a year. If youre saying you couldnt find efficiencies in that sum then stay away from management.
If you dont actively go looking for savings you wont find them.
And just to finish off some of the savings need to be put back in to spending on issues like infrastructure which longer term create further savings through productivity
Look at the forecasts for budget balance beforehand, in 2019.
I do agree with what I think you're implying, namely that a concrete approach should've been taken by the official Leave campaign for the sake of clarity, but there we are.
However, there will be various points in the future where the EU is undergoing a reform and/or enlargement - notably perhaps around security - in which the UK may well be seen as a desirable partner to have involved that may offer an opportunity to de facto rejoin via important structures (and eventually fully do so). If the settled view of the country is still, as it is now, that Brexit was a disastrous folly, then any government that isn't in fierce ideological opposition will look to do so.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02784/
Why is it you never ask if the EU wants the UK back ? All evidence suggests they had enough and rejoining is not on the cards. Well not unless PM Farage can call in a favour from Giorgia Meloni.
But the current fiscal targets are a joke promising to be good one day. The reputation of the Tories for being sound on finance has taken a hell of a dunt in this Parliament and will take quite some time to recover.
The usual right-wing fruit loops on here will continue to pretend there is nothing wrong and still put the x against the Conservatives. I actually pity them as they obviously need some kind of help. At least one of this group, @Leon has called a spade a spade and wants the Tories destroyed. His reasoning is wrong, immigration is not the main issue, it’s the fact that the Tories have completely and utterly Ratnered this country over the last 14 years.
Hopefully they will end up with less 15 seats but my betting position is 100-150 seats.
I voted Remain not because I thought brexit intrinsically bad, but because I suspected it would be harder to achieve than leading Brexiteers were willing to accept. I would start from a position of rejecting rejoin because likewise I think it’s trickier than is being assumed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/05/byron-donalds-nostalgia-jim-crow-00161786
...“During Jim Crow the Black family was together,” Donalds said during a Black GOP outreach event in a gentrifying part of Philadelphia on Tuesday, and criticized decades-old policies from former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson for promoting a culture of dependence. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were — not just conservative, because Black people always have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”..
The reason that this is clearly a Tory issue is that they had Treasury brain - so the benefits of spending if too intangible are just ignored. Infrastructure spending would increase economic growth, productivity, general health, etc etc. which would grow the economy. All Treasury sees is spending. This mindset needs to end.
There isn't a snowball in hell's chance of them having us back, and with good reason. Talk of rejoining is therefore poppycock. Why would anybody even raise it?
There are fewer more pro-EU posters on this site than me, and even I wouldn't support rejoining, not least because I am a believer in the idea that if you make the bed, you should lie in it. More kindly put, that means that we voted democratically to join and should abide by that decision, even if people like me think it was dumb. But since they won't have us back anyway, we don't even have to discuss it.
That doesn't mean we should develop a more constructive relationship with the EU. That's just common sense. I expect the EU would be up for that too, not least because they were partly to bame for the disater that was Brexit. But rejoin? That's fairyland, and nobody should think otherwise.
We could be just days away from a tipping point in the polls when Reform overtakes the Conservatives"
"Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/05/tory-left-driving-party-to-annihilation-at-farage-hands/
Remember Cameron's "bonfire"? That was only worth £0.5 billion.
If you’re transiting through LAX, literally 4 hours on a two leg flight booking and (hope to God) not stepping outside the airport, would you apply for an ETSA waiver or a C1 transit visa?
(Passport all tickety boo and biometric)
Experienced answers appreciated, thanks. xx
The problem has come in people assuming UNS. I don't think I've seen any attempt to analyse where the declines will come. If the Tories lose votes in SNP-Tory seats and SNP holds up, whilst the SNP vote declines in SNP-Lab seats, then you could see the Tories edged out rather than pick up seats.
Now, that's a big if, and I'm not saying it's likely. But the ripple of excitement that came after a poll a few days ago showing the Tories up 3pp was interesting. The 3pp rise was relative to the previous poll, and still showed the Tories losing a quarter of the Scottish vote compared to 2019 (as oppose to 45% of the 2019 vote in the previous poll). These are bad figures, nearly as bad as / worse than the SNP depending on which you pick.
A positive -- in terms of seats -- result for the Tories remains possible even with these Duguid shenanigans, but it's a risky bet.
Such as his donors.
I look forward to you commenting on the improvements in this area 1 year in.
Though not before we'd incurred most of the expense for none of the benefits.
I would expect us to rejoin eventually, perhaps c. 20 years, maybe less. The economic arguments will be compelling as will freedom of movement.
Unreformed for decades, with councils, both tory and labour, going under - property tax and council funding is a total f*cking mess.
We will no doubt end up with Lab matching this and another wasted five years of local government collapsing.
https://capx.co/quelling-our-quangos-could-save-billions/
They wholly embraced the idea that wishes were all that mattered. We have had enough of experts, and we can use alternative facts.
Reality beckons...
Nothing wrong with being old. You’ve paid your dues and done your bit. But don’t become so fossilised that you stop journeying.
Otherwise you’re left behind on the platform.
xx
I agree with @Alanbrooke that there must be room for increases in productivity and savings, especially after such a long period of rapid growth in spending, but I also think we need to be much more radical about how we cut current spending, not least to allow us to increase capital spending on infrastructure etc as you point out.
The Universal state pension is, to me, an obvious target. Anyone receiving other income of more than double average earnings, whether because they are still working or because of private or state pensions, should not be receiving it.
We need to make people pay for their care in old age rather than leave hundreds of thousands as inheritance after the State has picked up the tab.
Without fundamental changes like this there is no capacity for the likes of HS2 and therefore few opportunities to encourage future growth.
But it would leave one of the most interesting by election fights in years. A Tory party in turmoil and a Labour party of ‘change’ which has a huge majority. I suspect that both the Lib Dem’s and Reform would fancy it and at the right odds one of them having the constituency MP at Christmas 2024 would be an interesting bet.
Scottish Conservative leader
@Douglas4Moray
will stand in Aberdeenshire North and East Moray
A couple of million centre right voters plan to vote Labour this time. How many normally Labour floaters plan to vote Tory? Roughly zero. This is not because the Tories are too centrist or too competent for them.
Vibes got us out, and vibes will pull us back in. Nostalgia for a youth of war stories drove Brexit, nostalgia for a youth of school language exchanges is driving the yearning for Brejoin. We're all as irrational as each other.
If Brexit really were brilliant, that could have cemented it, but it isn't. In the meantime, we have to tiptoe round the subject, because otherwise Uncle Nigel will go off on one about how ungrateful the youth of today are after all the sacrifices he made.
And nobody really wants that.
Anyway, I suspect his return to leadership was peak Farage in the polls. He will decline as the Starmer v Sunak debates from which he is excluded continue and the Conservatives probably win back a few voters from Reform and the LDs if as is likely the Tory manifesto promises a big IHT cut
No new IT projects but productivity improvements - how the f*** does that work....
Thanks for confirming in 1 post my believe that you are absolutely f***ing clueless..
I don't see cutting things that help those who cannot work (the elderly) as a useful intervention. If anything we need more funding for that kind of work, as supporting those people is itself a job that needs doing and can be a source of pro social work. If you remove support for the elderly, their working age family are the ones who pick up the slack (as I well know) and that itself becomes a drag on productivity.
The UK can afford a robust social safety net system, robust social services, decent healthcare and public transport, without having to pick a group of people to immiserate. The wealth exists, it is in the hands of the exceedingly wealthy. Taxation on wealth and land, on empty or second (or third) homes, on financialised assets that do nothing but breed gold from barren gold - these are the places any sensible government would focus on. You will make the extremely wealthy marginally less wealthy - but not to the point of them being unable to cope.
Organisation cuts headcount, paying out redundancy.
Resultant workload pressures lead to experienced staff leave and/or take absence on long term stress.
Now with staff shortages they have little choice but to pay 2-3x salary to rehire the same people who have left as contractors.
Current salaried workforce get annoyed by the differentials on pay and go on strike, or become contractors themselves.
It just has cost us loads more, hence record investment in NHS but worse service, as one example. If we had seriously budgeted what we need, then paid for it we would be better off now than having a decade of top down austerity (a short burst was needed after the GFC). In parallel we should be working out sustainable ways of reducing costs (i.e. training 2x more doctors an obvious example, using more tech in healthcare another) - but those solutions come along as and when they do, not when politicians decide the budget looks better by reducing departmental budgets by 15% immediately.
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=376081
...The alliance was launched in response to the drug supply shortages experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Korea and the U.S. agreed to form the alliance during their dialogue on core emerging technologies in December, and expanded it to include Japan, India and the EU.
The £82 billion simply describes some public services provided via arms length organisations. And I am a massive fan of such organisations - they have a democratic mandate but avoid all the micro-meddling from politicians and civil servants, with all the confused objectives and values that comes with.
Lothian Buses my special favourite - provide good bus services, do not make an operating loss. Simple. Perfect.
Douglas Ross is standing as a conservative in your constituency
https://x.com/ianincyaak/status/1798623963960283277
Douglas Ross MSP
@Douglas4Moray ·9h
David Duguid has been a great MP, Government Minister and a true champion for his area.
As the neighbouring MP I worked closely with him and he was an excellent member of the Scottish Affairs Committee.
I wish him and his family all the very best for his continued recovery.
https://x.com/Douglas4Moray/status/1798473637496041867
I will probably have to pay some inheritance tax at some point when my grandparents pass away - they are splitting their only asset (their house) between 7 grandkids and my aunt. The house is only worth the ridiculous amount it is because it is within the M25 and the housing market is stupid. If we have to pay some tax - so be it. Again, I'd rather a functioning society than a bit more change in my pocket. The only people who really gripe about it are those who are already wedded to the "no such thing as society" mentality - the extremely wealthy who are all "I've got mine, Jack". If anything I think lots of people would be fine with inheritance tax increasing, especially on estates over £5 or £10 million.
As for the bed, it's part of being a voter in a democracy. You have to accept responsibility for your decisions if you are to avoid making them frivolously. Those of us who voted remain bear some responsibility for not making a better case. It's not just the fault of those who voted leave, entirely rationally in many instances. We all made the bed. We all have to lie in it, but by all means make it as comfortable as possible now that it is done.
https://x.com/RestIsPolitics/status/1798323366736388169