The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced ambitions to prioritise an area of the river in Teddington, south-west London, to make it safe and clean for swimming as part of a new 10-year strategy to reduce pollution in the river and encourage people to spend time in and around it.
*) Classic cock-up. *) A quick, cheap win: order the dumping of sewage, then stop it! Result - we've cleaned up the river! *) There was a short-term need to dump the sewage; this will be fixed in the next few years.
Take your pick!
4) the minister signed a piece of paper he found in his red box without properly reading and understanding it.
Two advantages of the plain, no-fee UK AMEX credit card:
- 1% cashback on everything - They let you set up a direct debit to pay the entire balance each month, almost as if it's a chargecard. So you can guarantee no interest is charged.
I only use it in places I already know take it, though.
The whole idea of having to ask if they take Amex puts me right off.
Two advantages of the plain, no-fee UK AMEX credit card:
- 1% cashback on everything - They let you set up a direct debit to pay the entire balance each month, almost as if it's a chargecard. So you can guarantee no interest is charged.
I only use it in places I already know take it, though.
Amex used to have this arrangement (maybe still does) where it will deal with any damage claims on car hire when you use its card to pay. It meant you didn't have to argue with rental companies about inflated repair bills or take out extortionate daily collision damage waivers
Top tip, you can get an annual policy covering you for all cdws on all the cars you hire. No longer the spectacular value they were but still better than what the car hire co wants
I have one of these policies "for peace of mind" but they don't quite address the real issue, which is having to deal with rental companies inflating, or in some cases inventing (Europcar I'm looking at you), damage repair bills. The great thing about the Amex arrangement is they looked after the whole thing for you.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced ambitions to prioritise an area of the river in Teddington, south-west London, to make it safe and clean for swimming as part of a new 10-year strategy to reduce pollution in the river and encourage people to spend time in and around it.
*) Classic cock-up. *) A quick, cheap win: order the dumping of sewage, then stop it! Result - we've cleaned up the river! *) There was a short-term need to dump the sewage; this will be fixed in the next few years.
Take your pick!
4) the minister signed a piece of paper he found in his red box without properly reading and understanding it.
The issue for Starmer isn't that he is getting a load of freebies, it is he made an absolute massive play on he was only in it for the public service, always country before party, cronyism has to end....
Free Gear Keir
Well, Two Tier Keir completely flopped, so his critics might as well try something else.
Do you remember Gordon Brittas? That was the classic of the genre.
It was ahead of its time.
"From now on, all high-caffeine energy drinks are to be banned from the leisure centre."
It certainly was ahead if its time. I don't want to deride it, because it was (as I remember) well scripted and acted, but it felt weirdly unfunny and, to me, unenjoyable - certainly cleverly done, but short on jokes and laughs and long on awkward. Nowadays, that's pretty much all sitcoms.
Still, remarkable that a not-particularly-widely-watched sitcom from 30+ years ago has such cultural currency. The name Gordon Brittas is far more widely known than most sitcom characters from the 80s and 90s.
is it? I've never heard anyone mention the Brittas Empire for decades apart from on this site.
Yes, I don't think it has the cultural memory of say Blackadder or Only Fools and Horses (which I never liked).
Two advantages of the plain, no-fee UK AMEX credit card:
- 1% cashback on everything - They let you set up a direct debit to pay the entire balance each month, almost as if it's a chargecard. So you can guarantee no interest is charged.
I only use it in places I already know take it, though.
Amex used to have this arrangement (maybe still does) where it will deal with any damage claims on car hire when you use its card to pay. It meant you didn't have to argue with rental companies about inflated repair bills or take out extortionate daily collision damage waivers
That hailstorm came out of nowhere. I was definitely not watching it on the radar for 2 hours beforehand.
Sorry about the 60 dents in the roof and the cracked windscreen. I'm sure they'll buff out.
Sometimes the daily collision waivers pay for themselves...
Car rental in most European holiday destinations is a total scam.
It all originates from the companies being local franchises of the well-known brands, and the brand owners seeing themselves as little more than booking agents. They have to get hundreds if not thousands of complaints before they take anything seriously, and know that if they re-tender the franchise they’ll have exactly the same problems from the next guy - who’s pretty likely to be the same guy with a new company, or that guy’s cousin.
Doubtless this, one of his frequent interventions, will be billed by the BBC as "a rare intervention".
The whole interview with Rajan is worth a watch. Major is becoming a bit old mannish in not quite believing how tough the economic climate is with regard to government's power to spend and borrow, but without saying in what way and why they have got it wrong. And Rajan didn't follow it up, which is a misses chance.
But Major is very good on the whole. A bit blind of course to his own contribution to the EU disaster. But so are they all.
Every politician who denied the UK public a vote on changes to the common market/EU etc, especially when other member states sought consent from their voters, bears some responsibility. It wasn't just Brown sneaking in to sign Lisbon away from the cameras.
Sky - only 30% of the population own a home and have a mortgage
This is one of those huge generational changes that people understand "in the small" (i.e. most people understand the living-at-home and renting stats among millennials) but not "in the large" - (i.e. millennials are now in their 30s and 40s, and many gen-z are well into their 20s).
What's good for home owners is no longer synonymous with what's good for people who go out and vote.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
"The Rising Wave of Unhappiness Happiness, measured in a variety of ways, has been on the decline for decades in the United States"
Why? Probably because society has been changing too fast for most people.
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
"The Rising Wave of Unhappiness Happiness, measured in a variety of ways, has been on the decline for decades in the United States"
Why? Probably because society has been changing too fast for most people.
Social media?
When asked a majority of teenagers and adults actually wish TikTok and SnapChat etc had never been invented.
Imagine thinking the same of, I don’t know, microwaves or gene therapy.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
Does shovelling more money to the public sector from higher taxes amount to a 'positive vision' one wonders.
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
Sky - only 30% of the population own a home and have a mortgage
This is one of those huge generational changes that people understand "in the small" (i.e. most people understand the living-at-home and renting stats among millennials) but not "in the large" - (i.e. millennials are now in their 30s and 40s, and many gen-z are well into their 20s).
What's good for home owners is no longer synonymous with what's good for people who go out and vote.
I keep telling people who live in paces like the Cotswolds, that they had better learn to like development. Because they would get a say in what happens.
As opposed to when the FuckTheCountrysideAndBuildEverywhere party gets in.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
I sincerely hope so.
But it's a sign of the times that I have an inkling of fear that it may be, or become, 'William is a wolf and you all must accept and endorse this or you will be disciplined'.
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
Own goal dictated by ridiculous budget date. Government says its primary task is fixing the black hole, so it's early years will be primarily governed by the budget. Which we will have not within a month of the election as happened in 2010, but in due course and when we get round to it. So nothing happens for months on end, there's a news vacuum, and the vacuum gets filled.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
"The Rising Wave of Unhappiness Happiness, measured in a variety of ways, has been on the decline for decades in the United States"
Why? Probably because society has been changing too fast for most people.
I would propose the following: One of the biggest factors in happiness is not your current situation, but whether you think next year will be better than this year. In the USA it used to be blatantly obvious that - in general - it would be. Now it no longer is. Citizens of the USA still have it pretty good, in world terms. But I'd suggest that that's not really relevant for happiness. What's driving unhappiness is that it's no longer getting any better.
The issue for Starmer isn't that he is getting a load of freebies, it is he made an absolute massive play on he was only in it for the public service, always country before party, cronyism has to end....
Free Gear Keir
Well, Two Tier Keir completely flopped, so his critics might as well try something else.
Do you remember Gordon Brittas? That was the classic of the genre.
It was ahead of its time.
"From now on, all high-caffeine energy drinks are to be banned from the leisure centre."
It certainly was ahead if its time. I don't want to deride it, because it was (as I remember) well scripted and acted, but it felt weirdly unfunny and, to me, unenjoyable - certainly cleverly done, but short on jokes and laughs and long on awkward. Nowadays, that's pretty much all sitcoms.
Still, remarkable that a not-particularly-widely-watched sitcom from 30+ years ago has such cultural currency. The name Gordon Brittas is far more widely known than most sitcom characters from the 80s and 90s.
is it? I've never heard anyone mention the Brittas Empire for decades apart from on this site.
Huh. Maybe I'm spending too much time on here then!
Sky - only 30% of the population own a home and have a mortgage
This is one of those huge generational changes that people understand "in the small" (i.e. most people understand the living-at-home and renting stats among millennials) but not "in the large" - (i.e. millennials are now in their 30s and 40s, and many gen-z are well into their 20s).
What's good for home owners is no longer synonymous with what's good for people who go out and vote.
I keep telling people who live in paces like the Cotswolds, that they had better learn to like development. Because they would get a say in what happens.
As opposed to when the FuckTheCountrysideAndBuildEverywhere party gets in.
Problem is they don't listen and vote for the Yellow NIMBY Party.
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
Fun point - it isn't clear how enriched the uranium in such reactors has to be. If it is the same as the naval reactors, that's 95% U235. Bomb grade material. And lots of it.
Kind of interesting to have available. Especially if you have one, unrun*, waiting to be commissioned....
*If the fuel for a nuclear reactor hasn't been used, it is safe to handle. Because the rods are clad (usually) in something that will absorb alpha and betas, you could pick them up in your bare hands. If it has been run, it becomes so radiative that you would die in minutes if you went near it.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
Labour really need to get their arse in gear because Rolls Royce don't need to build anything in the UK, they could just as easily build them in the Czech Republic.
Sky - only 30% of the population own a home and have a mortgage
This is one of those huge generational changes that people understand "in the small" (i.e. most people understand the living-at-home and renting stats among millennials) but not "in the large" - (i.e. millennials are now in their 30s and 40s, and many gen-z are well into their 20s).
What's good for home owners is no longer synonymous with what's good for people who go out and vote.
I keep telling people who live in paces like the Cotswolds, that they had better learn to like development. Because they would get a say in what happens.
As opposed to when the FuckTheCountrysideAndBuildEverywhere party gets in.
Problem is they don't listen and vote for the Yellow NIMBY Party.
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
Own goal dictated by ridiculous budget date. Government says its primary task is fixing the black hole, so it's early years will be primarily governed by the budget. Which we will have not within a month of the election as happened in 2010, but in due course and when we get round to it. So nothing happens for months on end, there's a news vacuum, and the vacuum gets filled.
That's what happens when you have an election just before the summer recess
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
Surely if everyone else goes along with this they are self-identifying as sheep?
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
Own goal dictated by ridiculous budget date. Government says its primary task is fixing the black hole, so it's early years will be primarily governed by the budget. Which we will have not within a month of the election as happened in 2010, but in due course and when we get round to it. So nothing happens for months on end, there's a news vacuum, and the vacuum gets filled.
The budget date was unavoidable.
OBR wants (from memory) 8 weeks to validate the figures so the earliest date for a budget was 11th September if (and only if) the budget was designed and ready to go in early July.
The October 30th date gave the treasury until the end of August to create a budget under the time constraints which is probably why the leaks are now appearing...
I suspect the stories about the council tax single person allowance tells me that council taxes are changing...
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
I’m not a fan of governments picking winners, but UK Gov should absolutely have funded the hell out of this, and done it years ago.
The US contender in the market is also still looking for a customer, so unless RR do it, it will be yet another critical market turned over to the Chinese.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
I’m not a fan of governments picking winners, but UK Gov should absolutely funded the hell out of this, and done it years ago.
The US contender in the market is also still looking for a customer, so unless RR do it, it will be yet another critical market turned over to the Chinese.
Some industries are so expensive that picking winners or at least funding plausible players is completely unavoidable.
It's really the biggest justification for leaving the EU, we can subsidise industries we need to succeed (SMR) / support (steel).
Just out of the briefing on the hiring freeze, the main reasons given are the uncertainty around what the new government is proposing on tax, worker rights and the economic outlook in the UK and more widely in Europe. Hence the investment now being shifted to APAC.
And that's lost business for UK plc all because of Rachel's phoney war. Still, only 41 sleeps to budget day.
She utterly ficked it - damaged inward investment and scared off a lot of people who would continue to invest and pay taxes just for political point scoring.
Still, Sir Keir is a serious lawyer and grown up, Angela is a woman of the people who raves in Ibiza - so edgy, and Rachel worked at the Bank of England who have got everything right over the years so no better CV.
Yes, it is definitely hurting. For these two roles just in my team it was 2x £120k-150k salary budgets that will no longer be spent in the UK at least for 12-18 months. That's ~£140k in tax that won't get paid now just from income tax and NI let alone the additional VAT from spending generated by those two very high earners.
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... bit that would be recursive...
It sounds like she’s falling into a Cummings-esque role, with her fingers in almost every department and nothing happening anywhere without her say-so. So lots of ruffled feather among ministers and senior CS.
Labour really need to get their arse in gear because Rolls Royce don't need to build anything in the UK, they could just as easily build them in the Czech Republic.
I think there will be some rules around not transfering nuclear IP outside of the UK (and maybe the US and Australia with the AUKUS agreement) so there will absolutely be some bits that will be constructed in the UK but I agree that the government should do whatever it takes and get it funded so the majority of the value chain stays here.
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
I’m guessing from a Tory perspective we don’t give a crap that a very senior civil servant is on £170k a year as it’s a big role needing a big salary to attract quality candidates.
The fun lies in the po-faced sanctimony from Starmer about everything then being shown to be hypocritical after his attack on Cummings pay rise (think was Cummings) and the fact that the ming vase strategy was great except they forgot that they had to so the dirty business of governing rather than playing yah boo sucks at the Tories.
Labour really need to get their arse in gear because Rolls Royce don't need to build anything in the UK, they could just as easily build them in the Czech Republic.
I think there will be some rules around not transfering nuclear IP outside of the UK (and maybe the US and Australia with the AUKUS agreement) so there will absolutely be some bits that will be constructed in the UK but I agree that the government should do whatever it takes and get it funded so the majority of the value chain stays here.
If the core is highly enriched there is a lot of paperwork regarding the NPT - but Czechia is on the no-problem list with regards to the NPT.
What the UK government should have done is to
1) Order one (1) modular reactor 2) Order one (1) tidal pond
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
I’m guessing from a Tory perspective we don’t give a crap that a very senior civil servant is on £170k a year as it’s a big role needing a big salary to attract quality candidates.
The fun lies in the po-faced sanctimony from Starmer about everything then being shown to be hypocritical after his attack on Cummings pay rise (think was Cummings) and the fact that the ming vase strategy was great except they forgot that they had to so the dirty business of governing rather than playing yah boo sucks at the Tories.
For a newly elected government, there is a strange sense of entitlement and right to rule which explains their obliviousness to blatant hypocrisy.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
Just out of the briefing on the hiring freeze, the main reasons given are the uncertainty around what the new government is proposing on tax, worker rights and the economic outlook in the UK and more widely in Europe. Hence the investment now being shifted to APAC.
And that's lost business for UK plc all because of Rachel's phoney war. Still, only 41 sleeps to budget day.
She utterly ficked it - damaged inward investment and scared off a lot of people who would continue to invest and pay taxes just for political point scoring.
Still, Sir Keir is a serious lawyer and grown up, Angela is a woman of the people who raves in Ibiza - so edgy, and Rachel worked at the Bank of England who have got everything right over the years so no better CV.
Yes, it is definitely hurting. For these two roles just in my team it was 2x £120k-150k salary budgets that will no longer be spent in the UK at least for 12-18 months. That's ~£140k in tax that won't get paid now just from income tax and NI let alone the additional VAT from spending generated by those two very high earners.
All fair points but most people don't operate in the £120-150k salary range. The economic policy of this country can't simply be attuned to the wealthy and the fear some (perhaps only a few) might or might not decide to leave.
This kind of financial and political intimidation is already occurring and it's a tune we've heard played quite often and expecially when there is a threat of tax rises. Quite clearly, there is a group which sees an alternative prospectus in reducing tax rates to generate growth and I'm not unsympathetic to the viewpoint.
The truth is we are running an annual budget deficit of £80-90 billion which is absurd - it's more than we spend on defence. It's unsustainable and there seems very little actual discussion on how it is to be reduced beyond the tired old schtick of cutting taxes and spending which suits those who pay a lot of tax and don't use public services. The mood, as we saw with Truss, doesn't support that any longer given most people use public services in one form or another and are perhaps recognising their preservation is of greater value.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
I’m not a fan of governments picking winners, but UK Gov should absolutely funded the hell out of this, and done it years ago.
The US contender in the market is also still looking for a customer, so unless RR do it, it will be yet another critical market turned over to the Chinese.
Some industries are so expensive that picking winners or at least funding plausible players is completely unavoidable.
It's really the biggest justification for leaving the EU, we can subsidise industries we need to succeed (SMR) / support (steel).
It's not really about picking winners - more about identifying critical industries.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
"The Foreign Secretary’s view that the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been “liberated” stands in contrast to the official stance of the British Government."
This is why you do not make someone who thinks Marie Antoinette discovered radium, foreign secretary. As with Klouseau himself, it's richly comedic at first and indeed second and third sight, but bloody serious deep down.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Back in the real world, I suspect no one will take much interest in what the British Foreign Secretary says about a conflict in which, let's be honest, we have no substantial involvement. Calling it an "absolute clanger" is seriously over the top.
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
Own goal dictated by ridiculous budget date. Government says its primary task is fixing the black hole, so it's early years will be primarily governed by the budget. Which we will have not within a month of the election as happened in 2010, but in due course and when we get round to it. So nothing happens for months on end, there's a news vacuum, and the vacuum gets filled.
The budget date was unavoidable.
OBR wants (from memory) 8 weeks to validate the figures so the earliest date for a budget was 11th September if (and only if) the budget was designed and ready to go in early July.
The October 30th date gave the treasury until the end of August to create a budget under the time constraints which is probably why the leaks are now appearing...
I suspect the stories about the council tax single person allowance tells me that council taxes are changing...
This will be really messy. Governments over the years have scaled back their outright support for local authorities, locked to recycling business rates. If the government are planning on tweaking the new system, or doing revaluations there's going to be some massive political shocks. Without having the council tax going into one giant pot and then getting redistributed based on the biases of central government (how business rates turns into formula grant) we will end up with some areas unexpectedly getting large increases in revenue and some getting much less.
The new government’s media management is terrible. Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
Own goal dictated by ridiculous budget date. Government says its primary task is fixing the black hole, so it's early years will be primarily governed by the budget. Which we will have not within a month of the election as happened in 2010, but in due course and when we get round to it. So nothing happens for months on end, there's a news vacuum, and the vacuum gets filled.
The budget date was unavoidable.
OBR wants (from memory) 8 weeks to validate the figures so the earliest date for a budget was 11th September if (and only if) the budget was designed and ready to go in early July.
The October 30th date gave the treasury until the end of August to create a budget under the time constraints which is probably why the leaks are now appearing...
I suspect the stories about the council tax single person allowance tells me that council taxes are changing...
This will be really messy. Governments over the years have scaled back their outright support for local authorities, locked to recycling business rates. If the government are planning on tweaking the new system, or doing revaluations there's going to be some massive political shocks. Without having the council tax going into one giant pot and then getting redistributed based on the biases of central government (how business rates turns into formula grant) we will end up with some areas unexpectedly getting large increases in revenue and some getting much less.
That's been the case since Osbourne screwed things up in (I think) 2016.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Back in the real world, I suspect no one will take much interest in what the British Foreign Secretary says about a conflict in which, let's be honest, we have no substantial involvement. Calling it an "absolute clanger" is seriously over the top.
Then we should give up our Security Council seat and abandon any remaining pretensions about soft power.
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
I’m guessing from a Tory perspective we don’t give a crap that a very senior civil servant is on £170k a year as it’s a big role needing a big salary to attract quality candidates.
The fun lies in the po-faced sanctimony from Starmer about everything then being shown to be hypocritical after his attack on Cummings pay rise (think was Cummings) and the fact that the ming vase strategy was great except they forgot that they had to so the dirty business of governing rather than playing yah boo sucks at the Tories.
For a newly elected government, there is a strange sense of entitlement and right to rule which explains their obliviousness to blatant hypocrisy.
I think you may find most "new" Governments behave much like their predecessors and for those who supported the previous Government it comes as a revelation to see how that Government actually comported itself in office.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
"The Foreign Secretary’s view that the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been “liberated” stands in contrast to the official stance of the British Government."
This is why you do not make someone who thinks Marie Antoinette discovered radium, foreign secretary. As with Klouseau himself, it's richly comedic at first and indeed second and third sight, but bloody serious deep down.
Nothing that can’t be fixed by buying Victoria Sponge some new dresses.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Back in the real world, I suspect no one will take much interest in what the British Foreign Secretary says about a conflict in which, let's be honest, we have no substantial involvement. Calling it an "absolute clanger" is seriously over the top.
The UK ambassador to Armenia will definitely care, as he’s about to get summoned to see the Armenian FS.
We all knew it was only a matter of when, not if, with Lammy. It’s a little susprising it took this long.
Just out of the briefing on the hiring freeze, the main reasons given are the uncertainty around what the new government is proposing on tax, worker rights and the economic outlook in the UK and more widely in Europe. Hence the investment now being shifted to APAC.
And that's lost business for UK plc all because of Rachel's phoney war. Still, only 41 sleeps to budget day.
She utterly ficked it - damaged inward investment and scared off a lot of people who would continue to invest and pay taxes just for political point scoring.
Still, Sir Keir is a serious lawyer and grown up, Angela is a woman of the people who raves in Ibiza - so edgy, and Rachel worked at the Bank of England who have got everything right over the years so no better CV.
Yes, it is definitely hurting. For these two roles just in my team it was 2x £120k-150k salary budgets that will no longer be spent in the UK at least for 12-18 months. That's ~£140k in tax that won't get paid now just from income tax and NI let alone the additional VAT from spending generated by those two very high earners.
All fair points but most people don't operate in the £120-150k salary range. The economic policy of this country can't simply be attuned to the wealthy and the fear some (perhaps only a few) might or might not decide to leave.
This kind of financial and political intimidation is already occurring and it's a tune we've heard played quite often and expecially when there is a threat of tax rises. Quite clearly, there is a group which sees an alternative prospectus in reducing tax rates to generate growth and I'm not unsympathetic to the viewpoint.
The truth is we are running an annual budget deficit of £80-90 billion which is absurd - it's more than we spend on defence. It's unsustainable and there seems very little actual discussion on how it is to be reduced beyond the tired old schtick of cutting taxes and spending which suits those who pay a lot of tax and don't use public services. The mood, as we saw with Truss, doesn't support that any longer given most people use public services in one form or another and are perhaps recognising their preservation is of greater value.
And the more serious your points are, the more urgently they need clarification. In a budget. Which is six weeks away. Because presumably Reeves's response to the truism that markets hate uncertainty, is Fuck markets.
I am relieved to have Yvette in place. The other 3 great offices are comedy central.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Just out of the briefing on the hiring freeze, the main reasons given are the uncertainty around what the new government is proposing on tax, worker rights and the economic outlook in the UK and more widely in Europe. Hence the investment now being shifted to APAC.
And that's lost business for UK plc all because of Rachel's phoney war. Still, only 41 sleeps to budget day.
She utterly ficked it - damaged inward investment and scared off a lot of people who would continue to invest and pay taxes just for political point scoring.
Still, Sir Keir is a serious lawyer and grown up, Angela is a woman of the people who raves in Ibiza - so edgy, and Rachel worked at the Bank of England who have got everything right over the years so no better CV.
Yes, it is definitely hurting. For these two roles just in my team it was 2x £120k-150k salary budgets that will no longer be spent in the UK at least for 12-18 months. That's ~£140k in tax that won't get paid now just from income tax and NI let alone the additional VAT from spending generated by those two very high earners.
All fair points but most people don't operate in the £120-150k salary range. The economic policy of this country can't simply be attuned to the wealthy and the fear some (perhaps only a few) might or might not decide to leave.
This kind of financial and political intimidation is already occurring and it's a tune we've heard played quite often and expecially when there is a threat of tax rises. Quite clearly, there is a group which sees an alternative prospectus in reducing tax rates to generate growth and I'm not unsympathetic to the viewpoint.
The truth is we are running an annual budget deficit of £80-90 billion which is absurd - it's more than we spend on defence. It's unsustainable and there seems very little actual discussion on how it is to be reduced beyond the tired old schtick of cutting taxes and spending which suits those who pay a lot of tax and don't use public services. The mood, as we saw with Truss, doesn't support that any longer given most people use public services in one form or another and are perhaps recognising their preservation is of greater value.
You're missing the point entirely, it's not just my team where hiring has been frozen, we're just looking for those two high end positions. Loads of mid level roles have also been shit canned at £50-70k and looking across the industry we're not the first company to do this in the last few months and nor will we be the last.
You seem to be making the argument for fewer highly paid jobs in the UK which makes no sense to me at all.
If you want to cut the deficit then you need to cut spending. You don't like to hear it but that means big cuts to state employment. The state employs more people than ever and accomplishes less than ever. Cutting people and increasing output per worker is the only way to sustainably reduce the deficit, raising tax will just push until a low growth dynamic and we'll forever be chasing our tail. Cutting spending is the answer but people like you don't want to admit that there are swathes of useless people employed in the public sector that could actually be doing something productive in other parts of the economy.
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
I’m not a fan of governments picking winners, but UK Gov should absolutely funded the hell out of this, and done it years ago.
The US contender in the market is also still looking for a customer, so unless RR do it, it will be yet another critical market turned over to the Chinese.
Some industries are so expensive that picking winners or at least funding plausible players is completely unavoidable.
It's really the biggest justification for leaving the EU, we can subsidise industries we need to succeed (SMR) / support (steel).
It's not really about picking winners - more about identifying critical industries.
And it's not so much about picking winners (or shouldn't be) as helping fund some contestants.
For example - my suggestion was to offer a subsidy for KWh of power storage in ZEVs, actually delivered to customers. Not even restricted to leecy - equivalents in hydrogen etc would be available.
The subsidy would be scaled according to the UK (or lack thereof) origin of the storage system. So if you make batteries in China and slap a label on them in the UK, you get 0%.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
...Another alternative used during the 1960s and 70s for the Elfin Creed was:
I will grow strong and straight – like the pine; Supple of limb – like the hare; Keen of eye like the eagle; I will seek health from the greenwood, Skill from crafts, And wisdom from those who will show me wisdom. I will be a worthy comrade in the Green Company, And a loyal member of the World Family...
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
It says the exact opposite of that.
People that are unhappy want to vote out those in charge, even when the alternative is seen as somewhat extreme by the incumbent Establishment. We are seeing this all over Europe, and it won’t be a surprise to see it again in the US. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
I’m not a fan of governments picking winners, but UK Gov should absolutely have funded the hell out of this, and done it years ago.
The US contender in the market is also still looking for a customer, so unless RR do it, it will be yet another critical market turned over to the Chinese.
Yes, because it's not about picking winners but rather energy security. If it happens to be a commercial winner too, so much the better.
I don't see Harris losing any of the states that Biden won in 2020.
I also expect her to win North Carolina.
And Florida iasn't yet out of reach.
I'd be extremely wary about making bullish predictions like that. There are certainly credible scenarios that lead to a Harris landslide (FWIW, I think Texas falls to her before Florida these days), but they're not the central case by any means.
Trump has enough form from 2016 and 2020 for engaging new / marginalised voters that didn't show up in earlier voting to make me sceptical about the accuracy of all US polling at the moment. The state polls in 2020 were particularly poor (which is thoroughly unhelpful when they're also so critical). They weren't much better in 2016. Plus there's the issue of him having sought to install officials running these elections who will do everything they can to deliver him the result administratively, if he doesn't win via the vote (and to bias the voting procedures to him too). Obviously, those are in places where Republicans have already won so in many cases not swing states - but in some they will be. That's a critical lesson he learned from 2020. Plus, of course, the Electoral College is currently biased to the Republicans in terms of national vote.
Trump still hasn't really found an effective attack line on Harris, or a one-word nickname that puts the necessary doubt in independents and marginal voters rather than his core - but that doesn't mean he won't, though time is rapidly running out.
Personally, I make the race extremely tight, with Trump marginal favourite, albeit that his ceiling is lower than Harris's, both in ECVs and vote totals.
All valid points, David, but for me overwhelmed by the strong sense of something on the turn and going off, something which has had its time, the 'something' being Donald Trump. If you feel this way the best time to say so - and to bet on it - is before it's fully reflected in the polls. Eg right now you can get decent prices (via the EC bands market on betfair) on a big Harris win. That's what I'm doing.
Fair enough if that's your judgement. All I'll say is that the normal rules don't apply to Trump. If they did, he'd have been out of the game for good in early 2016, well before the Republican nomination was decided. Harris does, IMO, have the opportunity to nail Trump as a laughing stock who's lost the plot and is losing his marbles but isn't hitting the target yet, as far as I can see. That's his true vulnerability (despite the fact it should be that his values and behaviour make him unfit for office).
There's a reason the Teamsters aren't making an endorsement this time, which is that their members are pro-Trump.
For all his faults, Joe Biden was always seen as a Union man.
Kamala Harris, well, isn’t. She’s is seen as a West Coast Liberal, lawyer, former prosecutor etc. Very much one of ‘them’ rather than one of ‘us’.
Trump at least gives the impression of standing up for the average working-class person, even if you don’t agree with him on everything. His latest interjection on payday lending being yet another positive example.
Is this story - you know - actually true though? We live in crazy time but we're not that far gone surely?
The article doesn't say what the consequence of this decision are. Is the pupil excused English and Maths classes on account of being a wolf? Are they served raw meat for lunch?
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
What happens if another pupil starts self identifying as a woodsman? Or yet another self identifies as a small child lost in a wood?
I don't see Harris losing any of the states that Biden won in 2020.
I also expect her to win North Carolina.
And Florida iasn't yet out of reach.
I'd be extremely wary about making bullish predictions like that. There are certainly credible scenarios that lead to a Harris landslide (FWIW, I think Texas falls to her before Florida these days), but they're not the central case by any means.
Trump has enough form from 2016 and 2020 for engaging new / marginalised voters that didn't show up in earlier voting to make me sceptical about the accuracy of all US polling at the moment. The state polls in 2020 were particularly poor (which is thoroughly unhelpful when they're also so critical). They weren't much better in 2016. Plus there's the issue of him having sought to install officials running these elections who will do everything they can to deliver him the result administratively, if he doesn't win via the vote (and to bias the voting procedures to him too). Obviously, those are in places where Republicans have already won so in many cases not swing states - but in some they will be. That's a critical lesson he learned from 2020. Plus, of course, the Electoral College is currently biased to the Republicans in terms of national vote.
Trump still hasn't really found an effective attack line on Harris, or a one-word nickname that puts the necessary doubt in independents and marginal voters rather than his core - but that doesn't mean he won't, though time is rapidly running out.
Personally, I make the race extremely tight, with Trump marginal favourite, albeit that his ceiling is lower than Harris's, both in ECVs and vote totals.
All valid points, David, but for me overwhelmed by the strong sense of something on the turn and going off, something which has had its time, the 'something' being Donald Trump. If you feel this way the best time to say so - and to bet on it - is before it's fully reflected in the polls. Eg right now you can get decent prices (via the EC bands market on betfair) on a big Harris win. That's what I'm doing.
Fair enough if that's your judgement. All I'll say is that the normal rules don't apply to Trump. If they did, he'd have been out of the game for good in early 2016, well before the Republican nomination was decided. Harris does, IMO, have the opportunity to nail Trump as a laughing stock who's lost the plot and is losing his marbles but isn't hitting the target yet, as far as I can see. That's his true vulnerability (despite the fact it should be that his values and behaviour make him unfit for office).
There's a reason the Teamsters aren't making an endorsement this time, which is that their members are pro-Trump.
For all his faults, Joe Biden was always seen as a Union man.
Kamala Harris, well, isn’t. She’s is seen as a West Coast Liberal, lawyer, former prosecutor etc. Very much one of ‘them’ rather than one of ‘us’.
Trump at least gives the impression of standing up for the average working-class person, even if you don’t agree with him on everything. His latest interjection on payday lending being yet another positive example.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Back in the real world, I suspect no one will take much interest in what the British Foreign Secretary says about a conflict in which, let's be honest, we have no substantial involvement. Calling it an "absolute clanger" is seriously over the top.
That's not true, a good HS can make a difference, that Lammy is in the role shows how little Starmer cares about it not that the UK isn't listened to.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
It says the exact opposite of that.
People that are unhappy want to vote out those in charge, even when the alternative is seen as somewhat extreme by the incumbent Establishment. We are seeing this all over Europe, and it won’t be a surprise to see it again in the US. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.
Sure. But that unhappiness his little correlation with whether people are actually, objectively, better off than they were four years ago - never mind whether the alternative is likely to make things better rather than worse. Grievance politics goes way beyond relying on logic and facts.
Reality is that the economics of a world in which 600m or so people have a First World standard of living looks very different from one in which 3-4bn do, even before adding in the effect of (related) anti-Climate Change measures.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
This really matters, for a number of reasons.
Poor Armenia. With friends like us...
"taken" would have been an obvious non row causing word to use. Of course being gung-ho partisan on the side of Armenia wouldn't be great either as Azerbaijan is supported/funded/besties with Turkey (Erdogan had a first row seat next to Aliyev for the victory parade a few years back) and Turkey is of course a NATO ally. Armenia whilst historically a Russian ally has fallen a bit out of bed with them as Putin has obviously been unable/unwilling to commit any "peacekeeping" troops to help them out (Obviously his hands are full with Ukraine etc) - so it's a nation that has iirc been looking slightly more westward than previously. Most of the world believes, I think I'm right in this that Azerbaijan is the aggressor in this one and Armenia the wronged - so this won't help us at the UN for instance.. Whilst precisely noone is going to change their vote on this issue in the UK it's the sort of conflict that requires careful diplomacy and words from our foreign secretary.
After their national union declined to make an endorsement, a growing number of Teamsters councils in critical swing states have endorsed Kamala Harris—Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and now Western Pennsylvania. https://x.com/joncoopertweets/status/1836582755263459356
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
It says the exact opposite of that.
People that are unhappy want to vote out those in charge, even when the alternative is seen as somewhat extreme by the incumbent Establishment. We are seeing this all over Europe, and it won’t be a surprise to see it again in the US. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.
Perhaps that's why Harris's campaign theme is "joy" - rather than "look what a good job we did on the economy" ?
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Back in the real world, I suspect no one will take much interest in what the British Foreign Secretary says about a conflict in which, let's be honest, we have no substantial involvement. Calling it an "absolute clanger" is seriously over the top.
That's not true, a good HS can make a difference, that Lammy is in the role shows how little Starmer cares about it not that the UK isn't listened to.
Cameron really was an excellent foreign Secretary, can't recall any errors really and got the balance right on Gaza.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
This really matters, for a number of reasons.
Poor Armenia. With friends like us...
"taken" would have been an obvious non row causing word to use. Of course being gung-ho partisan on the side of Armenia wouldn't be great either as Azerbaijan is supported/funded/besties with Turkey (Erdogan had a first row seat next to Aliyev for the victory parade a few years back) and Turkey is of course a NATO ally. Armenia whilst historically a Russian ally has fallen a bit out of bed with them as Putin has obviously been unable/unwilling to commit any "peacekeeping" troops to help them out (Obviously his hands are full with Ukraine etc) - so it's a nation that has iirc been looking slightly more westward than previously. Most of the world believes, I think I'm right in this that Azerbaijan is the aggressor in this one and Armenia the wronged - so this won't help us at the UN for instance.. Whilst precisely noone is going to change their vote on this issue in the UK it's the sort of conflict that requires careful diplomacy and words from our foreign secretary.
It could be argued that Armenia only became a Russian ally through CTSO because Turkey sided with Azerbaijan, and no-one else wanted to help them.
Turkey, of course, having a rather fractious history with Armenians. Which I should perhaps just leave at that...
"it's the sort of conflict that requires careful diplomacy and words from our foreign secretary."
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
It says the exact opposite of that.
People that are unhappy want to vote out those in charge, even when the alternative is seen as somewhat extreme by the incumbent Establishment. We are seeing this all over Europe, and it won’t be a surprise to see it again in the US. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.
Sure. But that unhappiness his little correlation with whether people are actually, objectively, better off than they were four years ago - never mind whether the alternative is likely to make things better rather than worse. Grievance politics goes way beyond relying on logic and facts.
Reality is that the economics of a world in which 600m or so people have a First World standard of living looks very different from one in which 3-4bn do, even before adding in the effect of (related) anti-Climate Change measures.
Agree that you don’t have to be actually worse off, simply feeling worse off is enough.
Inflation, especially in food and utilities, has been brutal in the US in the past four years. As in the UK, there’s a large disconnect between official economic statistics and the average person’s experience. The items with the highest inflation have been essential items, which make up a large proportion of the spending of the poorest deciles. Those poorest deciles have experienced personal inflation much more than the top deciles.
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
What an absolute clanger he's dropped there. It's the sort of language you'd expect from a partisan sitrep milliblogger covering some conflict or other - certainly not what the HS should be coming out with.
Back in the real world, I suspect no one will take much interest in what the British Foreign Secretary says about a conflict in which, let's be honest, we have no substantial involvement. Calling it an "absolute clanger" is seriously over the top.
That's not true, a good HS can make a difference, that Lammy is in the role shows how little Starmer cares about it not that the UK isn't listened to.
Cameron really was an excellent foreign Secretary, can't recall any errors really and got the balance right on Gaza.
As @Casino_Royale pointed out, it was a good fit for him, as it involved swanning around the world, staying in expensive hotels talking to Important People, mouthing meaningless words that met the principles and prejudices of the metropolitan elite, and achieving absolutely nothing.
If we forget the wokitude bit for moment, and started acted like grown ups, we would say: If someone identifies as a wolf, then they identify with the rights and duties of a wolf.
Their rights don't extend to education, a bedroom you can put wolf posters up in, the right to the NHS to treat you, a school to be taken seriously in, the right to be heard and only the barest right to life. Such right to life as there is will be in a Siberian forest 1000 miles form the nearest human. Virtually no humans owe any duties towatds wolves as individuals.
We owe a duty to this human person to treat their affliction.
I don't see Harris losing any of the states that Biden won in 2020.
I also expect her to win North Carolina.
And Florida iasn't yet out of reach.
I'd be extremely wary about making bullish predictions like that. There are certainly credible scenarios that lead to a Harris landslide (FWIW, I think Texas falls to her before Florida these days), but they're not the central case by any means.
Trump has enough form from 2016 and 2020 for engaging new / marginalised voters that didn't show up in earlier voting to make me sceptical about the accuracy of all US polling at the moment. The state polls in 2020 were particularly poor (which is thoroughly unhelpful when they're also so critical). They weren't much better in 2016. Plus there's the issue of him having sought to install officials running these elections who will do everything they can to deliver him the result administratively, if he doesn't win via the vote (and to bias the voting procedures to him too). Obviously, those are in places where Republicans have already won so in many cases not swing states - but in some they will be. That's a critical lesson he learned from 2020. Plus, of course, the Electoral College is currently biased to the Republicans in terms of national vote.
Trump still hasn't really found an effective attack line on Harris, or a one-word nickname that puts the necessary doubt in independents and marginal voters rather than his core - but that doesn't mean he won't, though time is rapidly running out.
Personally, I make the race extremely tight, with Trump marginal favourite, albeit that his ceiling is lower than Harris's, both in ECVs and vote totals.
All valid points, David, but for me overwhelmed by the strong sense of something on the turn and going off, something which has had its time, the 'something' being Donald Trump. If you feel this way the best time to say so - and to bet on it - is before it's fully reflected in the polls. Eg right now you can get decent prices (via the EC bands market on betfair) on a big Harris win. That's what I'm doing.
Fair enough if that's your judgement. All I'll say is that the normal rules don't apply to Trump. If they did, he'd have been out of the game for good in early 2016, well before the Republican nomination was decided. Harris does, IMO, have the opportunity to nail Trump as a laughing stock who's lost the plot and is losing his marbles but isn't hitting the target yet, as far as I can see. That's his true vulnerability (despite the fact it should be that his values and behaviour make him unfit for office).
There's a reason the Teamsters aren't making an endorsement this time, which is that their members are pro-Trump.
For all his faults, Joe Biden was always seen as a Union man.
Kamala Harris, well, isn’t. She’s is seen as a West Coast Liberal, lawyer, former prosecutor etc. Very much one of ‘them’ rather than one of ‘us’.
Trump at least gives the impression of standing up for the average working-class person, even if you don’t agree with him on everything. His latest interjection on payday lending being yet another positive example.
Those in California and New York have too but that is obviously less important. But that is a good selection of the most important marginal states.
Didn’t see that, thanks. While the national decisions make the news, we shouldn’t lose track of this being a series of local elections.
I’m still of the opinion that everything runs through Pennsylvania, unless there’s landslide one way or the other.
We are in complete agreement on that. If Harris wins PA she will also win Wisconsin and Michigan because they are moving together and are just a little less hard. If she loses PA she is hoping for something surprising like North Carolina or Georgia to take its place, both of which are much harder for her.
Its why, for all Walz's folksy charm, I would have gone for Shapiro. I really hope she doesn't regret that.
Is that +4 from its earlier survey or is it just showing the gap*?
(*I hate how US pollsters do this – I mean we can subtract 46 from 50 FFS...)
Its ridiculous isn't it. And the trend or direction of a poll compared with the previous one is so often much more important than the absolute numbers.
Maybe so but from what I can see they haven't included this poll. It's a bit crappy, RCP, slow and inconsistent. But it has clearer graphics than 538 which is why people use it I think.
Is that +4 from its earlier survey or is it just showing the gap*?
(*I hate how US pollsters do this – I mean we can subtract 46 from 50 FFS...)
Its ridiculous isn't it. And the trend or direction of a poll compared with the previous one is so often much more important than the absolute numbers.
Absolutely. Are Americans so poor at maths (math?) that they can't do primary school standard subtraction for themselves?
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
According to the Telegraph it seems that Simon Case has just filled his intray with his easiest task ever, investigating the source of "hostile briefing" against Sue Gray.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
It says the exact opposite of that.
People that are unhappy want to vote out those in charge, even when the alternative is seen as somewhat extreme by the incumbent Establishment. We are seeing this all over Europe, and it won’t be a surprise to see it again in the US. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.
Perhaps that's why Harris's campaign theme is "joy" - rather than "look what a good job we did on the economy" ?
It will be very interesting to compare and contrast a former prosecutor pushing Joy with a former prosecutor pushing Doom & Gloom.
Interesting though that is, it doesn't correctly get why Arizona (and Nevada) have swung Blue. It's nothing to do with Hispanics, and all to do with a massive increase in the proportion of graduates.
He knows he's being used as part of an internal leaking war and that the info he has will all be public soon anyway... what's the point!?
Can't we have some actual journalism about how well or badly the government is doing.
It does provide context to his story but maybe not in the way he intended. So Chris Mason writes a story about what Sue Gray earns with a vague suggestion of something inappropriate. He then provides "context" in this article which he says it has nothing to do with the money; the story is some people in the Labour hierarchy don't like Sue Gray. In the spirit of disclosure he mentions his own salary which is £100K more than Sue Gray for a job that is vastly less senior and important.
Beware of Whataboutery from friends of Sue Gray anxious for her not to be the story for too much longer.
What actually is the story about Sue Gray? She earns too much, says BBC hack who earns lots more than she does? Or: Some anonymous Labour people allegedly don't like her?
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
According to the Telegraph it seems that Simon Case has just filled his intray with his easiest task ever, investigating the source of "hostile briefing" against Sue Gray.
That sounds like a bureaucratic version of the plot of Murder on the Orient Express.
This article is a bit out of date (June this year) - but I think it provides at some length a good explanation why you haven't heard all that much about economic policy detail from Harris.
The Death of “Deliverism” https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/ ...Whatever the causes, it turns out that unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, “Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.”
Other researchers have shown that counties that went to Trump were often “landscapes of despair,” characterized by more economic distress, poor health, low educational attainment, high alcohol and suicide mortality rates, and high divorce rates. States with the lowest life expectancies and education levels used to vote strongly for Democrats, but the past four decades have witnessed what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called an “extraordinary realignment,” with those states now heavily favoring the Republican Party...
..The emotional alchemy of the authoritarian approach is so strong that it can override facts and material reality. Trump duped millions with his false claim to have brought back manufacturing jobs. (In reality, manufacturing jobs declined during his Administration.) By contrast, Biden’s success in reducing unemployment to the lowest level in 54 years goes virtually uncredited, with his approval rating hitting an all-time low of 36 percent this past May. In the same poll, an astounding 54 percent of Americans said that Trump handled the economy better than Biden has so far, compared to just 36 percent of Americans who felt the opposite was true. The MAGA extremist response succeeds because it speaks to a visceral sense of dissatisfaction and promises security, belonging, and recognition...
..importantly, authoritarianism does not depend on solving people’s problems to succeed politically..
Taking hundreds of words to say what Reagan said in eight: “Are you better off than four years ago?”
It says the exact opposite of that.
People that are unhappy want to vote out those in charge, even when the alternative is seen as somewhat extreme by the incumbent Establishment. We are seeing this all over Europe, and it won’t be a surprise to see it again in the US. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause.
Perhaps that's why Harris's campaign theme is "joy" - rather than "look what a good job we did on the economy" ?
“Joy”, and avoiding any difficult questions, might work in convention season, but I don’t see that they can run it all the way to November without having to outline at least some economic policy ideas.
"3.9 million on sickness benefits as Covid continues to take toll Every local authority in England and Wales bar one has had a rise in claimants, with experts suggesting the pandemic may have hit an ailing population and NHS harder"
Two advantages of the plain, no-fee UK AMEX credit card:
- 1% cashback on everything - They let you set up a direct debit to pay the entire balance each month, almost as if it's a chargecard. So you can guarantee no interest is charged.
I only use it in places I already know take it, though.
Amex used to have this arrangement (maybe still does) where it will deal with any damage claims on car hire when you use its card to pay. It meant you didn't have to argue with rental companies about inflated repair bills or take out extortionate daily collision damage waivers
That hailstorm came out of nowhere. I was definitely not watching it on the radar for 2 hours beforehand.
Sorry about the 60 dents in the roof and the cracked windscreen. I'm sure they'll buff out.
Sometimes the daily collision waivers pay for themselves...
Car rental in most European holiday destinations is a total scam.
It all originates from the companies being local franchises of the well-known brands, and the brand owners seeing themselves as little more than booking agents. They have to get hundreds if not thousands of complaints before they take anything seriously, and know that if they re-tender the franchise they’ll have exactly the same problems from the next guy - who’s pretty likely to be the same guy with a new company, or that guy’s cousin.
These days, Hertz/Europcar/Avis are less franchises and more centrally managed (largely because their major costs are cars and financing, and the bigger you are, the better deal you can negotiate). All three of them make far more money from selling "insurance" than they do from renting cars.
Comments
https://bsky.app/profile/paulmotty.bsky.social/post/3l4h54pbgcs2h
It all originates from the companies being local franchises of the well-known brands, and the brand owners seeing themselves as little more than booking agents. They have to get hundreds if not thousands of complaints before they take anything seriously, and know that if they re-tender the franchise they’ll have exactly the same problems from the next guy - who’s pretty likely to be the same guy with a new company, or that guy’s cousin.
What's good for home owners is no longer synonymous with what's good for people who go out and vote.
Teachers reportedly supporting the pupil who claims to be suffering from ‘species dysphoria’"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/19/schoolboy-uk-allowed-identify-as-a-wolf/
Happiness, measured in a variety of ways, has been on the decline for decades in the United States"
Why? Probably because society has been changing too fast for most people.
The new government’s media management is terrible.
Keir’s wardrobe, his box at the football, and Sue Gray’s salary are in total non-stories. But they are shaping an image of a sanctimonious but hypocritical administration.
As Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out yesterday, unless you have a positive vision you are pushing, the dogs in the media will come after you.
When asked a majority of teenagers and adults actually wish TikTok and SnapChat etc had never been invented.
Imagine thinking the same of, I don’t know, microwaves or gene therapy.
It could simply be a matter of, "Yes, William, you're a wolf, now be a good wolf and finish your worksheet."
https://www.ft.com/content/aee922e1-a29c-4150-ba6d-efba7a3d7bd5
(Article not actually clear on how firm this is, sadly).
As opposed to when the FuckTheCountrysideAndBuildEverywhere party gets in.
But it's a sign of the times that I have an inkling of fear that it may be, or become, 'William is a wolf and you all must accept and endorse this or you will be disciplined'.
One of the biggest factors in happiness is not your current situation, but whether you think next year will be better than this year. In the USA it used to be blatantly obvious that - in general - it would be. Now it no longer is.
Citizens of the USA still have it pretty good, in world terms. But I'd suggest that that's not really relevant for happiness. What's driving unhappiness is that it's no longer getting any better.
Kind of interesting to have available. Especially if you have one, unrun*, waiting to be commissioned....
*If the fuel for a nuclear reactor hasn't been used, it is safe to handle. Because the rods are clad (usually) in something that will absorb alpha and betas, you could pick them up in your bare hands. If it has been run, it becomes so radiative that you would die in minutes if you went near it.
Labour really need to get their arse in gear because Rolls Royce don't need to build anything in the UK, they could just as easily build them in the Czech Republic.
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Leopard
OBR wants (from memory) 8 weeks to validate the figures so the earliest date for a budget was 11th September if (and only if) the budget was designed and ready to go in early July.
The October 30th date gave the treasury until the end of August to create a budget under the time constraints which is probably why the leaks are now appearing...
I suspect the stories about the council tax single person allowance tells me that council taxes are changing...
The US contender in the market is also still looking for a customer, so unless RR do it, it will be yet another critical market turned over to the Chinese.
It's really the biggest justification for leaving the EU, we can subsidise industries we need to succeed (SMR) / support (steel).
I could comment on whataboutery about whataboutery ... but that would be recursive...
EXCL @GBNEWS: David Lammy sparks diplomatic row after 'ignorant' blog post on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Armenian diplomats are urgently seeking clarification after Lammy wrote in a blog that Azerbaijan had been able to 'liberate' territory.
The fun lies in the po-faced sanctimony from Starmer about everything then being shown to be hypocritical after his attack on Cummings pay rise (think was Cummings) and the fact that the ming vase strategy was great except they forgot that they had to so the dirty business of governing rather than playing yah boo sucks at the Tories.
What the UK government should have done is to
1) Order one (1) modular reactor
2) Order one (1) tidal pond
Indeed it's sort of a whole educational movement...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodcraft_Folk
Kind of like a hippy Scouts - and a century old.
This kind of financial and political intimidation is already occurring and it's a tune we've heard played quite often and expecially when there is a threat of tax rises. Quite clearly, there is a group which sees an alternative prospectus in reducing tax rates to generate growth and I'm not unsympathetic to the viewpoint.
The truth is we are running an annual budget deficit of £80-90 billion which is absurd - it's more than we spend on defence. It's unsustainable and there seems very little actual discussion on how it is to be reduced beyond the tired old schtick of cutting taxes and spending which suits those who pay a lot of tax and don't use public services. The mood, as we saw with Truss, doesn't support that any longer given most people use public services in one form or another and are perhaps recognising their preservation is of greater value.
This is why you do not make someone who thinks Marie Antoinette discovered radium, foreign secretary. As with Klouseau himself, it's richly comedic at first and indeed second and third sight, but bloody serious deep down.
If the government are planning on tweaking the new system, or doing revaluations there's going to be some massive political shocks. Without having the council tax going into one giant pot and then getting redistributed based on the biases of central government (how business rates turns into formula grant) we will end up with some areas unexpectedly getting large increases in revenue and some getting much less.
I voted Tory at the election to keep Dave as Foreign Secretary.
We all knew it was only a matter of when, not if, with Lammy. It’s a little susprising it took this long.
I am relieved to have Yvette in place. The other 3 great offices are comedy central.
Poor Armenia. With friends like us...
You seem to be making the argument for fewer highly paid jobs in the UK which makes no sense to me at all.
If you want to cut the deficit then you need to cut spending. You don't like to hear it but that means big cuts to state employment. The state employs more people than ever and accomplishes less than ever. Cutting people and increasing output per worker is the only way to sustainably reduce the deficit, raising tax will just push until a low growth dynamic and we'll forever be chasing our tail. Cutting spending is the answer but people like you don't want to admit that there are swathes of useless people employed in the public sector that could actually be doing something productive in other parts of the economy.
For example - my suggestion was to offer a subsidy for KWh of power storage in ZEVs, actually delivered to customers. Not even restricted to leecy - equivalents in hydrogen etc would be available.
The subsidy would be scaled according to the UK (or lack thereof) origin of the storage system. So if you make batteries in China and slap a label on them in the UK, you get 0%.
I will grow strong and straight – like the pine;
Supple of limb – like the hare;
Keen of eye like the eagle;
I will seek health from the greenwood,
Skill from crafts,
And wisdom from those who will show me wisdom.
I will be a worthy comrade in the Green Company,
And a loyal member of the World Family...
Those in California and New York have too but that is obviously less important. But that is a good selection of the most important marginal states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandervogel
I’m still of the opinion that everything runs through Pennsylvania, unless there’s landslide one way or the other.
Reality is that the economics of a world in which 600m or so people have a First World standard of living looks very different from one in which 3-4bn do, even before adding in the effect of (related) anti-Climate Change measures.
Whilst precisely noone is going to change their vote on this issue in the UK it's the sort of conflict that requires careful diplomacy and words from our foreign secretary.
🔵 Harris 50% (+4)
🔴 Trump 46%
Siena #A+ - 1082 LV - 9/16
https://x.com/joncoopertweets/status/1836582755263459356
Turkey, of course, having a rather fractious history with Armenians. Which I should perhaps just leave at that...
"it's the sort of conflict that requires careful diplomacy and words from our foreign secretary."
Damn right.
Inflation, especially in food and utilities, has been brutal in the US in the past four years. As in the UK, there’s a large disconnect between official economic statistics and the average person’s experience. The items with the highest inflation have been essential items, which make up a large proportion of the spending of the poorest deciles. Those poorest deciles have experienced personal inflation much more than the top deciles.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/president/2024/no-toss-up/electoral-college
(And back and forth several times before that.)
Their rights don't extend to education, a bedroom you can put wolf posters up in, the right to the NHS to treat you, a school to be taken seriously in, the right to be heard and only the barest right to life. Such right to life as there is will be in a Siberian forest 1000 miles form the nearest human. Virtually no humans owe any duties towatds wolves as individuals.
We owe a duty to this human person to treat their affliction.
Its why, for all Walz's folksy charm, I would have gone for Shapiro. I really hope she doesn't regret that.
(*I hate how US pollsters do this – I mean we can subtract 46 from 50 FFS...)
But you're right that they have moved it once again.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Every local authority in England and Wales bar one has had a rise in claimants, with experts suggesting the pandemic may have hit an ailing population and NHS harder"
The exception is the City of London.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/sickness-benefits-mental-health-ct328xxjc