The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
I had a mate who had a top floor penthouse in the Barbican. Superb views of the city and st pauls cathedral. Eventually he rented it out and moved to Mayfair.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
I had a mate who had a top floor penthouse in the Barbican. Superb views of the city and st pauls cathedral. Eventually he rented it out and moved to Mayfair.
A lesson to us all.
It had the added bonus of not having to look at the Barbican.
It is an oddity that so many of the best pubs in London are in and around Highgate and Hampstead
top of my head:
Spaniard's Inn The Flask The Flask Red Lion and Sun The Bull The Wells The Holly Bush Southampton Arms Freemason's Old White Bear
It must come from the days when they were salubrious villages - near to London but not in it, and with great views - and rich people wanted nice hostelrys
On a sunny day in spring or summer the Spaniard's might be the nicest pub in the entire world
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
Compared with most serviced flats the service charges really aren't that bad...
My friend is thinking of buying a flat in the Barbican, as a place to live in the week. I've tried to warn him that it sounds like a service charge nightmare. Firstly, it is a listed building. Second, it is over the height for the new building safety rules. Third, it is run by a local authority, so highly risk averse and without any incentive to reduce costs. Fourth, the service charge budget does not build up a reserve for major works. Finally most of the people who have bought there have no shortage of funds so repeatedly demand work takes place. Some of the reported costs are eye watering, IE 50k per flat for replacement windows.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
Compared with most serviced flats the service charges really aren't that bad...
My friend is thinking of buying a flat in the Barbican, as a place to live in the week. I've tried to warn him that it sounds like a service charge nightmare. Firstly, it is a listed building. Second, it is over the height for the new building safety rules. Third, it is run by a local authority, so highly risk averse and without any incentive to reduce costs. Fourth, the service charge budget does not build up a reserve for major works. Finally most of the people who have bought there have no shortage of funds so repeatedly demand work takes place. Some of the reported costs are eye watering, IE 50k per flat for replacement windows.
Low ceilings, as well, in many of the flats - IIRC
It is an oddity that so many of the best pubs in London are in and around Highgate and Hampstead
top of my head:
Spaniard's Inn The Flask The Flask Red Lion and Sun The Bull The Wells The Holly Bush Southampton Arms Freemason's Old White Bear
It must come from the days when they were salubrious villages - near to London but not in it, and with great views - and rich people wanted nice hostelrys
On a sunny day in spring or summer the Spaniard's might be the nicest pub in the entire world
For those PBers who have not yet discovered Tweedy Pubs
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I used to live in one of the tiny cottages next to (and owned by) The Flask on South Grove.
Lovely place but, well, tiny. My enduring memory was a slightly shamefaced return to the Whittington Hospital Emergency Department. 24 hours before I'd been in to have a cast fitted after I'd split my tibia flying a kite a little overenthusiastically on Barmouth beach the previous week.
Having got frustrated with the crutches I had taken to hopping around the cottage, but the doorways were so low I hopped into one and cracked my head open. I think the very same doctor glued my head back together as had put my cast on.
Lovely pub, though.
My friend lives with his partner on the Holly Lodge Estate, do you know it?
It's REALLY odd. A sort of massive 1920s gated community of Tudorbethan mansion blocks designed for "distressed gentlewomen" (they let men in now, as well, if their partners abide there)
They've got a beautiful flat and they pay peppercorn rent, trouble is if they ever move they lose it, and you can't buy them or sell them
I know it's not what you mean, but now I'm imagining some hideous lifelong game of statues for distressed gentlewomen.
Either an upmarket Tales of the Unexpected or a downmarket Wednesday Play.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
The Flask in Highgate, actually. Do a great Assyrtiko white
I know the Flask in Hampstead well. Is there one in Highgate too?
Yes! It's a gorgeous pub. Nicer than the one in Hampstead, to my mind. Lovely garden
And yes, it is confusing that there are two in posho north London
Less convenient for our house in Hampstead, mind. (Not that we live there, of course.)
You've moved - or are moving - to Hampstead?!
No. We own a house in Hampstead. We used to live there before we moved to the US. It's now rented out.
I doubt we'll move back there, because when we return from the US, our kids won't be living at home anymore, and so we'd much rather be more central.
I suspect we'll find a nice lateral apartment in Marylebone / Regent's Park; somewhere central enough to get easily to the Groucho Club.
Good choice. If I had endless cash I’d probably live in Marylebone. Or maybe a bit deeper into Primrose Hill
I can walk to the Groucho in 37 minutes from my flat as it is, which is a nice distance for sobering up
I would always go Barbican - because it's remarkable quiet once you are in the courtyard and I've always loved the architecture..
I nearly bought in the Barbican! In the end I decided it was just a bit too far from Soho etc. And I think you can suffer quite nasty service charges
But it is seductive. I also quite like the brutalism
Compared with most serviced flats the service charges really aren't that bad...
My friend is thinking of buying a flat in the Barbican, as a place to live in the week. I've tried to warn him that it sounds like a service charge nightmare. Firstly, it is a listed building. Second, it is over the height for the new building safety rules. Third, it is run by a local authority, so highly risk averse and without any incentive to reduce costs. Fourth, the service charge budget does not build up a reserve for major works. Finally most of the people who have bought there have no shortage of funds so repeatedly demand work takes place. Some of the reported costs are eye watering, IE 50k per flat for replacement windows.
It's good fun. Ugly as hell but a good place to live. Everything you might want for entertainment on site.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
@Leon I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
It is an oddity that so many of the best pubs in London are in and around Highgate and Hampstead
top of my head:
Spaniard's Inn The Flask The Flask Red Lion and Sun The Bull The Wells The Holly Bush Southampton Arms Freemason's Old White Bear
It must come from the days when they were salubrious villages - near to London but not in it, and with great views - and rich people wanted nice hostelrys
On a sunny day in spring or summer the Spaniard's might be the nicest pub in the entire world
Also very pricey but yes, nice. I have a special table there - under a tree.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
An increase in capacity leading to an increase in productivity,
With electric vehicles we don't even have the air pollution objection any more.
Yes, that always struck me as a weak point in the argument…
Apparently if a railway has higher usage than predicted its a good thing but if a road had higher usage than predicted its a bad thing.
“Moderation in all things” is a very difficult principle to embrace: either people think “if some are good, more must be better” or it’s “In some places there are too many, so we shouldn’t build any more anywhere”.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
He comes across quite well (low bar of not a total nutter like many leading Tories), but worrying when asked does he use AI, how does he use it...he says he uses it to get facts for his speeches, which he says then he checks the source it gives. This is totally the wrong way around to use it, you get the facts from numerous sources, then you get a LLM to piece together some prose based upon those facts and your argument, which you then tweak.
I worry most MPs are doing what Tom is doing and probably not checking.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
You don’t have any friends. Let alone “lefty” friends. Having friends involves liking people. You don’t like the concept of people.
What about the concept of seals?
By the way, could you please ask your friends to stop doing this?
A single scull is hard enough to row without a freeloader.
Is that poor seal trying to flee a toxic waste dump?
Interestingly, I was told by a chap who does the water testing for the river swimmers that the Thames is one of the least polluted river in a capital city in Europe.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
Over thirty years since a motorway was built in Britain so why don't we have the infrastructure advocates demanding more roads and new motorways ?
I think I probably count as an 'infrastructure advocate', and I have called for more roads and new motorways. Where they make sense, at least.
You may remember my comments about the ***** ***** group who delayed the new A428 dualling near me by six months, at a cost of millions. Or talking in favour of dualling all the A1 to Scotland. Or the the new lower Thames Crossing, etc, etc.
I just talk about railways more because I'm more interested in them, and I read more about them.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
I really have no idea what you're on about
I've just checked vanilla and the only usage by me of "subhuman" is referring to ISIS, which is fair comment, and also the view of far right Israelis towards Palestinians, also fair comment
David Frum @davidfrum · 4h Can we delete the phrase, "The race is close in the battleground states"? If the race were not close, it would not be a battleground state.
Not quite sure, though it isn't very important. In the UK 2024 election the battleground constituencies were the ones which made the difference between Con/Lab parties winning or losing and so forming the next government. But the race wasn't at all close.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
This is not to defend anyone calling anyone subhuman, but Leon cheerfully abuses everyone in the most strident terms - I find it extremely plausible that he doesn't remember doing it. You should treat it with the same indifference as he clearly has.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
I really have no idea what you're on about
I've just checked vanilla and the only usage by me of "subhuman" is referring to ISIS, which is fair comment, and also the view of far right Israelis towards Palestinians, also fair comment
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
Hardly a hanging offence in all honesty. I didn't realise family members had to be included in the register of MP's expenses. I'm not entirely sure why.
I do agree but then the rules are the rules and it just adds to the freebie stories
Here are the rules. They are not straight forward and open to interpretation in many places.
You're right. It does add to the freebie stories for those with an agenda to damage the Labour Party. If I were Starmer I'd just ignore it until people got bored with it.
By the time theyre bored with it the stench of corruption will be well established
Now you are by marriage part of the nouvelle aristocratie française aren't you a bit uncomfortable about your buttock clenching puritanism? Loosen up. You'll embarrass the family
It won't, but it has ratnered Starmer's USP of I am a man of public service, country other party, I am not interested in money.
But it's also true.
The holier than thou thing won't save him if Britain isn't working better in 2028/9. And if it is working better, all this will have been forgotten.
Same as 2020/1, there is no external politics for a while now. If Starmer annoys his MPs enough, they might be able to topple him, but it's harder on the red side than the blue. There's no equivalent of Graham Brady's bulging sack.
It's not polite to say it out loud, but we do have something of an elected dictatorship in the UK. The rest of us might as well take a 2-3 year holiday while they do what they do.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
This is not to defend anyone calling anyone subhuman, but Leon cheerfully abuses everyone in the most strident terms - I find it extremely plausible that he doesn't remember doing it. You should treat it with the same indifference as he clearly has.
Well, yeah, but also I don't recall using this word against Mr Seal, and it isn't in the vanilla archives
I'm always happy to apologise when I cross the line - and of course sometimes I do - but in this case I'm not even sure I did...
But if it can be cited, I will fess up and say sorry!
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
I really have no idea what you're on about
I've just checked vanilla and the only usage by me of "subhuman" is referring to ISIS, which is fair comment, and also the view of far right Israelis towards Palestinians, also fair comment
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
Wow. You are clearly not happy in your life at all mate.
It won't, but it has ratnered Starmer's USP of I am a man of public service, country other party, I am not interested in money.
But it's also true.
The holier than thou thing won't save him if Britain isn't working better in 2028/9. And if it is working better, all this will have been forgotten.
Same as 2020/1, there is no external politics for a while now. If Starmer annoys his MPs enough, they might be able to topple him, but it's harder on the red side than the blue. There's no equivalent of Graham Brady's bulging sack.
It's not polite to say it out loud, but we do have something of an elected dictatorship in the UK. The rest of us might as well take a 2-3 year holiday while they do what they do.
Yes and no. It might have still given him some wiggle room for I am working night and day, public service, public service, public service, things aren't massively better yet, but we are turning it around and look we are better than the Tory lot before.
Now, he can't play that card, he is in the mud with all politicians. So, I think he had to make feel like things are significantly better.
But, yes, PMs have got away before with plenty of self enrichment and scandal if the country is doing well. Nobody really cared about Blair freebie holidays and his wife loving a freebie goodie bag or even some very dodgy donations, because the economy was flying.
Turning around the current situation is much bigger ask than I think all previous PMs since the 1970s have inherited. Even 2010, things were on the turn a little bit and there was wiggle room. Now its stubborn inflation, high interest rates, high taxes, low productivity, massive debt.
The main issue is not speed (it seldom is, with HS2) but capacity.
The point is, the Elizabeth Line does not have the capacity to accommodate everyone getting off HS2 at OOC and continuing into Central London – and nor do its high demand Central London stations (Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street).
If you were the only passenger on HS2 and you were going from Manchester to Central London (Bond Street, say) you might not be particularly inconvenienced by getting off at Old Oak Common and getting on the Elizabeth Line – indeed, you might choose to do that anyway*. But if EVERYONE has to get off at OOC, the result is huge queues on the Elizabeth Line, with the result that in practice, your journey to Central London is much longer as you cannot get on the first Elizabeth Line train that comes (as well as congestion on other modes).
(Indeed, the same would be true if we had Euston but no OOC. The reason HS2 has both Euston AND OOC is to spread out the demand on London’s network rather than having it all land in one place.)
While it’s hard to place a specific value on journey times, due to the point about where in London your destination is, HS2’s demand modelling (referenced by Oakervee, see below) shows that two thirds of HS2 passengers prefer Euston, while one-third prefer OOC. Therefore, by abandoning Euston, we would be providing disbenefits to two-thirds of passengers.
*Lets assume interchange times at Euston and OOC are equivalent; a ten minute trip from OOC to Bond Street on the Elizabeth Line is comparable to what it would take on the tube, and you save yourself the additional time on HS2 between OOC and Euston. Of course, there are other destinations in Central London which would be more easily reached from Euston than OOC (Charing Cross, for example), for which it would be less convenient to get off at OOC.
Perhaps these issues could be mitigated by moving lots of things to Old Oak Common? The HoC refurb would be a lot cheaper if it was in Acton, and we'd save a lot on MPs housing allowances.
Is there really a capacity issue wrt Crossrail and HS2 passengers disembarking. HS2 is 500 seats a train I think? Crossrail trains are bigger than that iirc. Obviously there will be other passengers already on Crossrail - but how many? Are Crossrail trains full already?
My experience of travelling on the Elizabeth line suggests that that would be a big concern, but whether my observation is correct is another matter.
The Elizabeth line seems also to have quite a lot of issues. I'd say that the majority of the times I've used it there has been something or other - although that seems to be lessening over time.
From observation, absolutely huge numbers of people use the Elizabeth line.
Indeedy. It's striking how busy it is, even off-peak.
There's also something psychological that's changed about the geography of this bit of London. Stepping on a train in the suburbs of Romford and stepping off in the West End ties one to London in a way that changing at Liverpool Street doesn't. Rail lines are magic like that in a way that roads aren't.
But yes- whatever problems Britain has, an excess of railway lines isn't one of them.
The Elizabeth Line has comfortably exceeded all the benefits set out in its business case.
It is an astoundingly successful project that has helped move London forward.
It's a pretty good demonstration of how much pent-up demand there is for new infrastructure in Britain, as the foundations piece shared the other day argues.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
I get the feeling that you don’t thin through your ideas to fill in the very obvious gaps / flaws within them.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
@Luckyguy1983 As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
This is not to defend anyone calling anyone subhuman, but Leon cheerfully abuses everyone in the most strident terms - I find it extremely plausible that he doesn't remember doing it. You should treat it with the same indifference as he clearly has.
No, you should tell him he's a piece of shit if that's what you think. Why give him the courtesy he doesn't extend to others?
But with that £70k a year snapper, they will make sure always get her best angle for the gram while being a disgrace.
Interesting. Rishi had one too. Thought if she wants some decent snapper she'll have to pay more than that
Most PMs have had one, first time a deputy has had a dedicated one (there is already a whole team of people for PR and with quality of phones / filters these days, do you even a dedicated photographer for every day nonsense?), and when you are also telling everybody times are super tough, so Maureen on £12k a year pension, no WFA for you.
A little bit wooden and not quick on her feet with flashes of Wildeish wit. But in modern politics nowhere close to the bottom of the pile. Suspend further judgment till after the budget?
We did of course vote in droves for boring competence. The boring bit has been delivered quickly.
Changing the subject, the freebies they get are a bit naff. Have none of them been tempted by tickets for The Ring at Bayreuth or a box at La Fenice? Roy Jenkins and Dennis Healey will be turning in their graves asnd asking Who on earth is Miss Swift?
It won't, but it has ratnered Starmer's USP of I am a man of public service, country other party, I am not interested in money.
But it's also true.
The holier than thou thing won't save him if Britain isn't working better in 2028/9. And if it is working better, all this will have been forgotten.
Same as 2020/1, there is no external politics for a while now. If Starmer annoys his MPs enough, they might be able to topple him, but it's harder on the red side than the blue. There's no equivalent of Graham Brady's bulging sack.
It's not polite to say it out loud, but we do have something of an elected dictatorship in the UK. The rest of us might as well take a 2-3 year holiday while they do what they do.
Yes and no. It might have still given him some wiggle room for I am working night and day, public service, public service, public service, things aren't massively better yet, but we are turning it around and look we are better than the Tory lot before.
Now, he can't play that card, he is in the mud with all politicians. So, I think he had to make feel like things are significantly better.
But, yes, PMs have got away before with plenty of self enrichment and scandal if the country is doing well. Nobody really cared about Blair freebie holidays and his wife loving a freebie goodie bag or even some very dodgy donations, because the economy was flying.
Turning around the current situation is much bigger ask than I think all previous PMs since the 1970s have inherited.
But spare a thought for poor Lord Alli who says it's "not nice" to be scrutinised just because youre buying the government
The second draft of the Blob article by @viewcode has gone up backstage. If anybody wants to be a prereader please reply to this email before Thursday when the final draft goes up.
Yeah let's get back to smarmy gits like Osborne. Proper Chancellors.
I don't think there are many people on PB with a greater disdain for George Osborne (the one time in 18 years OGH told me off was when I said Boy George was a "creep")
However, the fact is Labour are in power now and the focus is on them. And so far they are being found wanting in many areas. Generally that doesn't really matter to anything but if you have a CotE that's not up to it, it can cause all sorts of problems for everyone.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
Who do you think you are @BorisJohnson telling working class people to rely on their own efforts when you go round with a begging bowl to Tory donors to pay for your posh new wallpaper and moan that you can't live off your £150,000 salary? Disgusting.
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
The fact is we as a country look incompetent if we don't finish a project we start... Now I'm sorry but as a foreign investor where would you invest your money
1) the UK, 2) or somewhere (in Eastern Europe, say) that actually delivers their promises.
You would invest in somewhere that has a sense of reality about costs, priorities and resource availability but not niche obsessions.
And stopping a bad project looks a lot more competent than attempting to finish it because you don't want to admit things have gone wrong.
If Boris had started his Thames Estuary airport or his Scotland-Ireland bridge should they have been completed to 'impress' foreign investors ?
We are talking about HS2 here - it's hardly a niche project - it's the type of project where you look at Italy / Spain or France and see them being continually built and expended...
Different countries, different requirements.
A quick look at the maps will show that France and Spain are 'wheel shaped' with a big city in the centre and then other cities around the rim, whereas England is more of a small, solid rectangle of London-Bristol-Liverpool-Hull.
Also, very different costs.
And yes, HS2 is a niche project. Obsessed over by middle class nerds with time on their hands.
In the real world 90% of journeys happen by road, but how often are new roads and where to build them discussed on PB ?
The last new motorway in the United Kingdom (The M3 motorway in Northern Ireland) opened in 1994.
Who do you think you are @BorisJohnson telling working class people to rely on their own efforts when you go round with a begging bowl to Tory donors to pay for your posh new wallpaper and moan that you can't live off your £150,000 salary? Disgusting."
It is either incredibly arrogance or stupidity that a) you don't use an auto-deleter for your tweets and b) if you have spent 3 years go nuclear on this kind of soft corruption, you better make sure you don't do it yourself.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
I get the feeling that you don’t thin through your ideas to fill in the very obvious gaps / flaws within them.
I get the feeling you thought you'd be having 'the biggest laugh since Liz Truss' and actually I've made several good points that you haven't put a glove on.
Waste from energy doesn't need Government 'investment' - it does need Government to cut through planning bs and nimbyism, which isn't the same thing.
Tidal does need Government involvement, as does every large scale energy infrastructure change, but I took a position against HS2 - it was you who spuriously translated that into an attack on all 'investment', not me.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
Wow. You are clearly not happy in your life at all mate.
RIP TomW, one of the best efforts PB has seen in some months. The key is to clear the "BA pilots with COVID" hurdle and then you can last a couple of days.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
This is not to defend anyone calling anyone subhuman, but Leon cheerfully abuses everyone in the most strident terms - I find it extremely plausible that he doesn't remember doing it. You should treat it with the same indifference as he clearly has.
No, you should tell him he's a piece of shit if that's what you think. Why give him the courtesy he doesn't extend to others?
Well, I agree. I've no problem with robust disagreement to the point of strident abuse (the mods always ban people if they go too far). They are just words. And you will note that I am content to accept it, just as I dish it out, and I do not whine
However I do NOT recall these words, so it is a mystery
Anyway, time for my exciting daily kettleball exercise. I recommend it for the ageing male
I listened to the whole thing. I was driving on my scooter with earphones and I thought she was excellent. Almost brought a lump to my throat. So well constructed. If she isn't next Labour leader it'll be because she's no longer around
It won't, but it has ratnered Starmer's USP of I am a man of public service, country other party, I am not interested in money.
But it's also true.
The holier than thou thing won't save him if Britain isn't working better in 2028/9. And if it is working better, all this will have been forgotten.
Same as 2020/1, there is no external politics for a while now. If Starmer annoys his MPs enough, they might be able to topple him, but it's harder on the red side than the blue. There's no equivalent of Graham Brady's bulging sack.
It's not polite to say it out loud, but we do have something of an elected dictatorship in the UK. The rest of us might as well take a 2-3 year holiday while they do what they do.
Yes and no. It might have still given him some wiggle room for I am working night and day, public service, public service, public service, things aren't massively better yet, but we are turning it around and look we are better than the Tory lot before.
Now, he can't play that card, he is in the mud with all politicians. So, I think he had to make feel like things are significantly better.
But, yes, PMs have got away before with plenty of self enrichment and scandal if the country is doing well. Nobody really cared about Blair freebie holidays and his wife loving a freebie goodie bag or even some very dodgy donations, because the economy was flying.
Turning around the current situation is much bigger ask than I think all previous PMs since the 1970s have inherited.
But spare a thought for poor Lord Alli who says it's "not nice" to be scrutinised just because youre buying the government
So far he has got off very lightly. The focus has been all on the politicians. People like Lord Ashcroft, the Guardian spent year after year digging through absolutely everything he had ever done.
I listened to the whole thing. I was driving on my scooter with earphones and I thought she was excellent. Almost brought a lump to my throat. So well constructed. If she isn't next Labour leader it'll be because she's no longer around
I listened to the whole thing. I was driving on my scooter with earphones and I thought she was excellent. Almost brought a lump to my throat. So well constructed. If she isn't next Labour leader it'll be because she's no longer around
Yeah let's get back to smarmy gits like Osborne. Proper Chancellors.
I don't think there are many people on PB with a greater disdain for George Osborne (the one time in 18 years OGH told me off was when I said Boy George was a "creep")
However, the fact is Labour are in power now and the focus is on them. And so far they are being found wanting in many areas. Generally that doesn't really matter to anything but if you have a CotE that's not up to it, it can cause all sorts of problems for everyone.
Ok. But way premature imo. Give her a couple of years at least. Isn't 'short termism' generally agreed to be one of our biggest problems?
I listened to the whole thing. I was driving on my scooter with earphones and I thought she was excellent. Almost brought a lump to my throat. So well constructed. If she isn't next Labour leader it'll be because she's no longer around
I listened to the whole thing. I was driving on my scooter with earphones and I thought she was excellent. Almost brought a lump to my throat. So well constructed. If she isn't next Labour leader it'll be because she's no longer around
I hope you weren't doing this from France, because you have just admitted to a crime.
Yeah let's get back to smarmy gits like Osborne. Proper Chancellors.
I don't think there are many people on PB with a greater disdain for George Osborne (the one time in 18 years OGH told me off was when I said Boy George was a "creep")
However, the fact is Labour are in power now and the focus is on them. And so far they are being found wanting in many areas. Generally that doesn't really matter to anything but if you have a CotE that's not up to it, it can cause all sorts of problems for everyone.
Ok. But way premature imo. Give her a couple of years at least. Isn't 'short termism' generally agreed to be one of our biggest problems?
But as the saying goes, first impressions count...
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority that assumes I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
Value for money. Think of all the Russian tank turrets entered into the Turret Lobbing Olympics - all for the price of some nearly time expired munitions.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
@Luckyguy1983 As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
S
I don't think it is implausible that this country could become a net exporter of oil and gas. The idea of fracking working here is poo-poohed with great gusto, but note the fracking ban. Since when did you need to ban something that has no chance of getting off the ground?
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
I really have no idea what you're on about
I've just checked vanilla and the only usage by me of "subhuman" is referring to ISIS, which is fair comment, and also the view of far right Israelis towards Palestinians, also fair comment
Those (HS2) options in full: 1) Build HS2 properly so it can serve its strategic purpose for the next century. 2) Make a century-defining historic error, fuck up the growth mission and become an international laughing stock.
Idiot commentary like this makes me doubt the case even more. Exactly the same simplistic fact-light inventive-heavy guff that remainers use.
Infrastructure matters. It really matters. But it is expensive and large projects take more than one parliament (or two, or three...) to plan, let alone build. That makes them very susceptible to politics, because bunging money at people is far easier and has much more obvious and immediate political results.
In Victorian times, there were powerful voices against railway lines being built (or, in some cases, the 'wrong' lines). This led to some stupid situations (Haddon Tunnel, for a small example). But imagine if the naysayers had been able to veto all the lines. Or, in the 1960s and 1970s, motorways had not been built at vast public cost.
HS2 is just another example of this. The alternatives just do not work: as the West Coast Main Line Upgrade showed. You spend the same, or more, at massive disruption and get less. One recent plan would have the West Coast line being totally closed for three months for just some of the work.
The Elizabeth Line was costly, and problematic. Both the cost and problems are being forgotten as Londoners gain a brilliant new railway. The same is true of (say) the Humber Bridge.
I'd have put the Humber Bridge in the white elephant category. It was meant to link to an East Coast Motorway but that was canned centuries ago and elegant though it is I don't think it justifies the cost. Does anyone in Hull really want to go to Immingham or vice versa?
I suppose when the M62 bridge at Goole falls into the river it will allow for a diversion.
The least they could do now is to remove the toll.
If it was in Scotland it would have been de-tolled years ago (as per the Skye bridge). One small benefit of devolution (and the Barnett Formula). Thanks, guys.
Value for money. Think of all the Russian tank turrets entered into the Turret Lobbing Olympics - all for the price of some nearly time expired munitions.
If only it were nearly time-expired munitions with us. I'm pretty sure the Foreign Secretary has just hosed £600mill in hard cash at him with shit all involvement by the British armament or any other industry.
I listened to the whole thing. I was driving on my scooter with earphones and I thought she was excellent. Almost brought a lump to my throat. So well constructed. If she isn't next Labour leader it'll be because she's no longer around
I hope you weren't doing this from France, because you have just admitted to a crime.
It's only a crime if you're one of the little people.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
@Luckyguy1983 As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
S
I don't think it is implausible that this country could become a net exporter of oil and gas. The idea of fracking working here is poo-poohed with great gusto, but note the fracking ban. Since when did you need to ban something that has no chance of getting off the ground?
Because the owner of your typical UK fracking firm is a grade A clueless idiot and no one locally wanted the hassle…
Quite a clever alternative to imposing tariffs. However, didn't the likes of VW have a joint partnership with a Chinese company for their in-car software?
The US is planning to ban certain hardware and software made in China and Russia from cars, trucks and buses in the US due to security risks. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyegl8q80do
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
@Luckyguy1983 As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
S
I don't think it is implausible that this country could become a net exporter of oil and gas. The idea of fracking working here is poo-poohed with great gusto, but note the fracking ban. Since when did you need to ban something that has no chance of getting off the ground?
Because the owner of your typical UK fracking firm is a grade A clueless idiot
Quite a clever alternative to imposing tariffs. However, didn't the likes of VW have a joint partnership with a Chinese company for their in-car software?
The US is planning to ban certain hardware and software made in China and Russia from cars, trucks and buses in the US due to security risks. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyegl8q80do
I suspect some Americans would say “and” rather than “however”.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
@Luckyguy1983 As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
S
I don't think it is implausible that this country could become a net exporter of oil and gas. The idea of fracking working here is poo-poohed with great gusto, but note the fracking ban. Since when did you need to ban something that has no chance of getting off the ground?
Because the owner of your typical UK fracking firm is a grade A clueless idiot
And?
The ban was a cost-free bit of performative posing from politicians because fracking in the UK had gone nowhere even when there wasn't a ban.
Unbanning fracking would similarly achieve nothing.
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
Love to know who you would temper the wfa announcement - there are very limited datasets available hence the switch to pension credit as it's the only other dataset that is usable...
Council House bands. A-C
Crude and doesn't help that much as 60% are in bands A-C.
Difficult to argue that band D and above need it, even if they are asset rich and cash poor.
Now tell me which households in bands A-C have people who qualify for it?
And how you are going to administer the payments because you've now got councils involved...
Every pensioner who recieves a state pension has a national insurance number, a date of birth and an address. Each of those addresses has a council tax band, which are maintained by the Valuation Office not local councils. Its a relatively simple data merge.
As I said, crude. Imperfect certainly but it would solve 98% of the problem.
No doubt there will be load of whataboutery but never let the perfect by the enemy of the good.
Btw single person discount to stay, if not already noted. Huzzah from saddo loners like me.
And an excellent guardian comment: labour winning power is the dog which chases cars catching up with a car.
Get it done, raising the money with a tax on the Chiltern Tories who made the most unneeded bit cost so much by insisting we made a largely flat railway line go through a tunnel.
Joking of course, but it is incredibly stupid not building the bits that genuinely make a difference to capacity on overstretched northern lines and have the potential to provide vital links, because David Cameron and his MPs wasted billions ensuring people they met at the farmers market would never have to listen to trains like common plebs.
Or perhaps it was just never a particularly good project, and has been sold on the basis of being 'infrastructure' because we 'need infrastructure', when actually it has all the appropriateness in serving our national infrastructure needs as handing a deep sea diver a toaster and telling him use it to breathe underwater.
There's an argument they could have chosen a better route, sure and have run it better. But a new North to South rail lines that looks pretty much like HS2 - which might as well be High Speed as that's not the main reason for the cost, is absolutely necessary (as are the others that were supposed to link to it) unless you want the railways to become close to unusable before too long.
If we scrap it we'll end up having to build it at some point - just 20-30 years later than we should have and long after it was necessary.
It was always missold as speed rather than capacity - if you take the fast few stop intercity services off the existing lines you can run more frequent local trains and increase capacity. Otherwise you're looking at managing demand and ever more broken railways.
It's what that idiot Sunak and the Tories completely failed to understand when they 'scrapped it'. By doing so they were condemning the railways to exactly the disastrous problems they claimed the saved money would fix.
It is those who oppose it and have tried to stymie it who have been both incredibly stupid and probably set back rail transport in this country back decades.
Meh. I appreciate your passion, but it's an awful lot of fuss over a single railway line that will have no impact on the vast majority of peoples' lives, whether it's about speed or capacity.
I also disbelieve profoundly in the power of new infrascture to revive economies. It won't. Revive the economies, then build the infrastructure - it will be clear what is needed, and potentially the private sector will build it.
Go on then - how do we revive the economy of the North without investment?
But again, there you change the goalposts - you realise it sounds silly to say 'without HS2' so you generalise it to 'investment', as if HS2 *is* the personification of all infrastructure spending - except it isn't. It is one, very expensive and very geographically-limited project, that even in the most wildly optimistic projections, will not 'revive the economy of the North'.
Since you asked however, there are many things without 'investment' that we can do to revive the economy of the North, which is (or was) primarily an industrial economy.
1. Increase the supply of low cost energy to businesses until it is as cheap here as it is in the USA - it is wholly uneconomical to run a business that makes things in the UK. 2. Support businesses with the tax conditions necessary for them to thrive - low Corporation Tax being one that springs readily to mind, as well as specific tax incentives to get high quality manufacturing businesses off the ground. 3. Take justified steps to protect British manufacturing companies from their Chinese and other global rivals' attempts to compete unfairly with them, including reciprocal tariffs, penalties for dishonestly acquired IP, etc.
1) So how would you get that low cost energy? 2) then how do you kick off high quality manufacturing because that also requires demand and where is that going to come from. Now granted you could import companies by lowering corporation tax but they will leave as soon as you start to increase the tax rates so it's only a temporary solution. 3) so that will keep the UK domestic market but how would you stop EU countries from purchasing the Chinese knock offs at a cheaper price.
1. We have had many conversations about this - they are well rehearsed. Suffice it to say are a nation abundant in energy sources - gas, oil, tidal, energy-from-waste, and that's before you get to small reactors. We do almost everything possible to create dysfunction and perverse incentives that ensure that energy is exorbitant here. Indeed many see the high price of energy as a moral mission.
2. The demand has not gone anywhere; the things just aren't being made here, for the reasons I outlined (unless I misunderstood in what sense you meant demand).
3. We're not owed lunch - we must create the necessary support for our businesses to thrive, and then have them compete on world markets and succeed or fail. There are some things we're actually already pretty good at that have high growth potential (drugs, cosmetics), others we've historically been good at that have high potential to do well (high quality garments, yarns and fabrics, leathers).
Gas and oil isn’t cheap when the other option is selling it on the global market at the current market price. As for tidal and energy from waste how does that work unless the Government invests in it (which to me would be infrastructure investment).
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
If that were an inviolable truth, prices of gas and oil would be the same in the US as they are here. They aren't, and I assume that is because supply is enough to export and to sell domestically at an attractive rate. Some could give us a more detailed explanation I'm sure.
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
@Luckyguy1983 As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
S
I don't think it is implausible that this country could become a net exporter of oil and gas. The idea of fracking working here is poo-poohed with great gusto, but note the fracking ban. Since when did you need to ban something that has no chance of getting off the ground?
We shouldn't have banned fracking.
At the same time, you do need to accept that of all the wells dilled by Cuadrilla/iGas and the like that found commercial quantities of tight oil and gas was... counts... zero.
Now, if people want to spend their money on drilling explorative wells, I don't think the government should be stopping them.
But I would point out that of the 48 shale formations in the US, only seven ended up having significant drilling activity, of which only four and a half have turned out to be economically viable. And of these, the Permian Basin probably accounts for 90% of the activity.
How do you know that UK shale is like the Permian, and not like - say - the Monterey Shale? (The Monterey is estimated to contain about 14bn barrels of oil... but the geology - with many folds, faults and fractures - turned out to be extremely difficult to exploit. It's not enough that there is oil and gas there, it also need to be economically extractable.)
The PB lefties seem to be taking the Total Shittiness of the Starmer Government quite badly
I guess it must be painful tho. 14 years of hope and waiting and all that patiently invested faith, and then… THIS
It's not that bad because I didn't have high hopes going in to it.
Also, so far, the largest decision of substance has been on cutting WFA, and given where I think the country is at the moment - budget deficit too large, but need to increase investment spending - that definitely has the air of a decision that was so right it should have been done years ago.
Obviously it's great that PB Righties have been able to take to the pleasures of opposition so quickly and with so much enthusiasm. Right-wingers railing at a Labour government just feels like the natural order of things. You Righties were desperate to be in opposition for years.
Yes some truth in that. Being in opposition is quite fun - you can really put the boot in. And Labour present quite the target
I’m still surprised by the tantrum-throwing despondency of some PB lefties, however
Their plight is explained by Kubler Ross on stages of grief. KR is about responses to SHOCK, not death. It's about how people in their 40s with no apparent health issues respond to "I wouldn't start reading any long novels" diagnoses. That's not the Tory party, which died in a hospice in July, to almost everyone's relief, after 3 years in and out of hospital. Not a shock. Starmer and Co's couldn't-make-it-up levels of cynical incompetence: huge shock, not just to the left but to anyone who was sort of hoping to be competently governed for five minutes. But the non-left have the compensation of at least getting a good laugh out of it.
Yes, you could be right
Also I am getting serious anger at HMG from my lefty friends. Last night (as I mentioned on here) one of my oldest Labour-voting friends was spitting venom about the stupidity of Starmer and Co, he didn't even wait for me to tease him about it: he launched right in. And a glimpse at the BTL comments on the Guardian, today, beneath the rolling blog about Reeves, offers quite the spectacle. The Labour lefties are furious about the austerity and WFA and all that, and the Blairities are furious about the grift and incompetence
" difficult decisions" Rachel Reeves has taken
-should I get the dress or the trouser suit ? - should I ask Lord Alli to buy the shoes too ?
New
Reeves enjoyed a week holiday in Padstow in July gifted to her by Richard Parker, Labour donor and now mayor of West Midlands and while logging her stay, she omitted her family members enjoyed the stay which benefit has to be declared
This is possibly going to end in resignations
I suspect not.
As you conceded in our exchange yesterday, the problem isn't the gifts themselves which probably aren't that different to those received by Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in the past (perhaps not the scale of them) when the order of the day was either Gannex raincoats or shooting parties on a friend's estate.
The two problems are first the commitments made by Starmer and others as to how they would comport themselves in Government which were long on generalities ("cleaning up Government") and short on specifics and which has left them open to the slightest receipt of the smallest thing being a case of grift or venality.
Second is the juxtaposition of accepting freebies, going on free holidays and the rest at a time when many pensioners are going to lose the winter fuel allowance and the cliff-edge nature of the means testing has a number of pensioners losing the £250 on the basis of having income less than £5 over the threshold.
Both are unnecessary self-inflicted wounds which, you could argue, is part of the learning process about being in Government but it's given the Tories, who, let's face it, have had a pretty rotten last couple of years, something to smile about (or it will until we seek the parade of the unelectables next week).
What I find strange is no one in Labour saw or realised what the public reaction would be. Absent the wfa debacle, the grift itself is probably not too serious - the Ecclestone affair was far worse. The wfa announcement was just plain stupid - if you do something like this, the losers will be the first to scream and scream loud and long.
I suspect the wfa announcement will be tempered in the Budget by some tapering of the cliff edge and perhaps some changes on who is involved.
But that's why I think there might have to be a resignation or two
This is now such a mess Labour have to spill some blood to propitiate the angry Gods. A human sacrifice is needed
If it happens it will surely be a lesser minister. Perhaps that daft Education woman with her "but the bribe was too nice to resist!" Taylor Swift tickets
OTOH if they start sacking people where does it end?
As my lefty friend said yesterday, "it's just so fucking stupid"
Your lefty friend again! I can imagine you going round the bars in Camden and drinkers start leaving like there's a flood 'Oh fuck not him again! All he talks about is Starmer' He hobbles you into a corner and bores you to death. I'm out of here.....!'
You don't imagine he travels the world because he can write? No, the landlords of Camden clubbed together and sent him off places, just to protect their trade.
He's like one of those incontinent farting dogs. Can you imagine him sitting there with his marionette before they throw him out....
'You take it from me Archle, Starmer and Reeves are getting their comeuppance...."
You, @Anabobazina and @DougSeal really aren't taking Labour's First 100 Day Debacle very well, are you?
I don’t give a fuck about that . What I take personally is the fact that you have no respect for your fellow humans.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
When did I ever call you "subhuman"??!!
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
Fuck off. You know exactly when it was you disingenuous piece of shit. Trying to squirm out of it now is pathetic. If you’re going to make comments like that at least be a man and stand by them. You are a contemptible human being. And despite your sneering metropolitan media sense of superiority I am somehow unworthy to breath your oxygen I am too. You are the worst.
I really have no idea what you're on about
I've just checked vanilla and the only usage by me of "subhuman" is referring to ISIS, which is fair comment, and also the view of far right Israelis towards Palestinians, also fair comment
Comments
top of my head:
Spaniard's Inn
The Flask
The Flask
Red Lion and Sun
The Bull
The Wells
The Holly Bush
Southampton Arms
Freemason's
Old White Bear
It must come from the days when they were salubrious villages - near to London but not in it, and with great views - and rich people wanted nice hostelrys
On a sunny day in spring or summer the Spaniard's might be the nicest pub in the entire world
Which is the point of them.
An increase in capacity leading to an increase in productivity,
With electric vehicles we don't even have the air pollution objection any more.
As for your other points replace we are good at with we were good at…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZremSm2UFYw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcjW44r0r4w
https://x.com/Resist_05/status/1838286473130578222
Either an upmarket Tales of the Unexpected or a downmarket Wednesday Play.
Go Big Z!
I find your latter 'point' rather asinine. I don't get the feeling you particularly like the economy or want it to succeed.
I take it personally as you have described me as “subhuman” and unworthy of life. It’s got nothing to do with the travails of a government I voted for without any particular hope for the future.
I’ve been through too much in my life to take people like you picking at others (including my) misfortune as a laugh for your personal amusement. You rejoice in others misfortune. That’s why you fuck me off so much.
If I did it was a joke. And I sincerely apologise if it was a joke that went down badly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz-FyxM_cKI
He comes across quite well (low bar of not a total nutter like many leading Tories), but worrying when asked does he use AI, how does he use it...he says he uses it to get facts for his speeches, which he says then he checks the source it gives. This is totally the wrong way around to use it, you get the facts from numerous sources, then you get a LLM to piece together some prose based upon those facts and your argument, which you then tweak.
I worry most MPs are doing what Tom is doing and probably not checking.
Build new motorways and you can build new towns along the new routes.
"I see Churchill is back in the US asking for more money. How many times is that now."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu8q9-M7GTU
You may remember my comments about the ***** ***** group who delayed the new A428 dualling near me by six months, at a cost of millions. Or talking in favour of dualling all the A1 to Scotland. Or the the new lower Thames Crossing, etc, etc.
I just talk about railways more because I'm more interested in them, and I read more about them.
I've just checked vanilla and the only usage by me of "subhuman" is referring to ISIS, which is fair comment, and also the view of far right Israelis towards Palestinians, also fair comment
Have a look for yourself
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/search?Page=p5&Search=subhuman
You will find @Gardenwalker calling Sarah Vine "subhuman", which does seem a bit strong
She's a complete and utter dead loss isn't she? 😂
She married Michael Gove for Christ's sake. She if not actually subhuman, then certainly subhuman adjacent.
The holier than thou thing won't save him if Britain isn't working better in 2028/9. And if it is working better, all this will have been forgotten.
Same as 2020/1, there is no external politics for a while now. If Starmer annoys his MPs enough, they might be able to topple him, but it's harder on the red side than the blue. There's no equivalent of Graham Brady's bulging sack.
It's not polite to say it out loud, but we do have something of an elected dictatorship in the UK. The rest of us might as well take a 2-3 year holiday while they do what they do.
I'm always happy to apologise when I cross the line - and of course sometimes I do - but in this case I'm not even sure I did...
But if it can be cited, I will fess up and say sorry!
Now, he can't play that card, he is in the mud with all politicians. So, I think he had to make feel like things are significantly better.
But, yes, PMs have got away before with plenty of self enrichment and scandal if the country is doing well. Nobody really cared about Blair freebie holidays and his wife loving a freebie goodie bag or even some very dodgy donations, because the economy was flying.
Turning around the current situation is much bigger ask than I think all previous PMs since the 1970s have inherited. Even 2010, things were on the turn a little bit and there was wiggle room. Now its stubborn inflation, high interest rates, high taxes, low productivity, massive debt.
Sir John Curtice not a Labour optimist
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/23/the-writing-is-on-already-the-wall-for-labours-government/
As long as we import *some* gas, domestic producers will be able to charge a penny below the import price.
I think the USA is a net exporter, so the competition is all within the US, and producers need to factor the costs of exporting (as compressing and exporting etc)
S
We did of course vote in droves for boring competence. The boring bit has been delivered quickly.
Changing the subject, the freebies they get are a bit naff. Have none of them been tempted by tickets for The Ring at Bayreuth or a box at La Fenice? Roy Jenkins and Dennis Healey will be turning in their graves asnd asking Who on earth is Miss Swift?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/23/lord-alli-fixer-labour-candidates-mp/
However, the fact is Labour are in power now and the focus is on them. And so far they are being found wanting in many areas. Generally that doesn't really matter to anything but if you have a CotE that's not up to it, it can cause all sorts of problems for everyone.
"@AngelaRayner
Who do you think you are @BorisJohnson telling working class people to rely on their own efforts when you go round with a begging bowl to Tory donors to pay for your posh new wallpaper and moan that you can't live off your £150,000 salary? Disgusting.
8:54 AM · Aug 27, 2021"
https://x.com/AngelaRayner/status/1431163178826833924
Build a road and you immediately create room for new housing, new business parks, new industrial estates, new recreational facilities.
But some people lack the vision to image anything happening beyond the edge of the present big cities.
https://youtu.be/GbEsE7DlotA?si=OtSb4zfxss8mfttg
It is either incredibly arrogance or stupidity that a) you don't use an auto-deleter for your tweets and b) if you have spent 3 years go nuclear on this kind of soft corruption, you better make sure you don't do it yourself.
Waste from energy doesn't need Government 'investment' - it does need Government to cut through planning bs and nimbyism, which isn't the same thing.
Tidal does need Government involvement, as does every large scale energy infrastructure change, but I took a position against HS2 - it was you who spuriously translated that into an attack on all 'investment', not me.
However I do NOT recall these words, so it is a mystery
Anyway, time for my exciting daily kettleball exercise. I recommend it for the ageing male
Matthew Faulding, who was in charge of candidate selection for this year’s general election, was on secondment to the Labour donor
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/23/lord-alli-fixer-labour-candidates-mp/
Small world.
I blame my agent.
Who is also me.
So... that just leaves the cat.
I know a lot of them, and.... the living isn't so easy, not any more
The US is planning to ban certain hardware and software made in China and Russia from cars, trucks and buses in the US due to security risks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyegl8q80do
Unbanning fracking would similarly achieve nothing.
At the same time, you do need to accept that of all the wells dilled by Cuadrilla/iGas and the like that found commercial quantities of tight oil and gas was... counts... zero.
Now, if people want to spend their money on drilling explorative wells, I don't think the government should be stopping them.
But I would point out that of the 48 shale formations in the US, only seven ended up having significant drilling activity, of which only four and a half have turned out to be economically viable. And of these, the Permian Basin probably accounts for 90% of the activity.
How do you know that UK shale is like the Permian, and not like - say - the Monterey Shale? (The Monterey is estimated to contain about 14bn barrels of oil... but the geology - with many folds, faults and fractures - turned out to be extremely difficult to exploit. It's not enough that there is oil and gas there, it also need to be economically extractable.)