I suggest a new tracker is needed, maybe even with a red and blue dotted line, starting from GE of 2017. On that day, not so long ago, the Lab/Con combined support was 82.3%. At GE 2024 it was 57.4%. In this poll it is 54%.
There must be a point at which this plummeting figure becomes game changing. So which way it goes is important. One to watch.
Though that poll surprises me. For LRG to remain flat given the Labour tribulations and the paucity of decent Tory leadership candidates is a poor show.
LRG? Or does GLR sounds better? LRG perhaps too similar sounding to LLG. Or do we add SNP and other too? I think we should
SLORG (the). The SLORG has stayed flat on 46%
SLORG it is. The SLORG v Labcon index. The Labcon can be a red and blue dotted line. SLORG can be unfairly represented by a dotted line of rats in a sack fighting over Galloway's hat.
So bets on the date of SLORG crossover? I don't actually think that'll happen because even a small Tory recovery will put paid to it. But it would fascinating to see.
A pedant writes: as SLORG=100%-Labcon, a graph of SLORG vs Labcon would be two mirrored lines. You just need to depict Labcon and see when it dips below 50%.
This is of course true but without two lines you can't have a proper crossover.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
It doesn't propose taxing such imports as a means of reducing consumer prices, though. Which is what Trump claims for his "tariffs on everything" policy.
There are decent arguments for some tariffs, on some goods, for revenue purposes, or protection of domestic markets etc. Trump's arguments are those of an ignorant child.
Point of order. Starmer hasn't embezzled anything. Unlike people associated with the Conservative Party who stole £15 billion from the State in dodgy Covid contracts.
No journalists (to my knowledge) have pointed out that if you run a business and received £100k worth of freebies you might be in trouble under the Bribery Act and you almost certainly would have top pay Benefit in Kind tax. As he is already in the 45% bracket it means he ought to get a tax bill of £45k
Any accountants in that want to comment? Am I right?
MPs are a unique problem. They are neither businesses nor employees nor political parties. This site is just creaming with bad faith, low information takes on this whole issue.
Hang on, I thought my MP worked for me, which is why I've always been very scrupulous about not offering him even as much as a cup of tea when he knocks on the door, in case he becomes liable for BIK taxes
This is the rather bizarre post on the last thread in reply to my admission that during the GE campaign I had given Labour £100.....
Jessop:
£100 is nowhere near enough. £100 gets you put on the list of mugs who donate. You are one of thousands. At best, you will be forgotten. At medium, you will be pestered by them for future donations. At worst, you will be pestered by many people (*).
But £20,000 is different. That is a different list. They will care for you. They will nurture you. You may be invited to events; the larger the figure, the greater the events. They will want more money from you, so will want to know what *you* want. And therein lies the start of potential corruption.
And Alli has given far, far more than £20,000 to Labour figures. Apparently, that buys you a voice in candidate selection and a Number 10 pass...
(*) If you give to certain charities, you can suddenly start getting pestered by other charities. It's almost as though the mug list is shared amongst them...
When Maurice Saatchi next has his brainstorming session in his Chateau on Cap Ferrat I'll make sure this is posted on his ENORMOUS gates.
I see what you did there Roger, you little tinker, you doubled up a devastatingly incisive political comment with a nudge-nudge that you actually don’t just know where Maurice Saatchi lives, (not far from you natch) but he has enormous gates.
Most people would drop in how well they know Maurice or let slip an anecdote about when they were at a party at his mansion on Cap Ferrat but you trump that by knowing he has big gates, even better than actually being invited past them.
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
I suggest a new tracker is needed, maybe even with a red and blue dotted line, starting from GE of 2017. On that day, not so long ago, the Lab/Con combined support was 82.3%. At GE 2024 it was 57.4%. In this poll it is 54%.
There must be a point at which this plummeting figure becomes game changing. So which way it goes is important. One to watch.
Though that poll surprises me. For LRG to remain flat given the Labour tribulations and the paucity of decent Tory leadership candidates is a poor show.
LRG? Or does GLR sounds better? LRG perhaps too similar sounding to LLG. Or do we add SNP and other too? I think we should
SLORG (the). The SLORG has stayed flat on 46%
SLORG it is. The SLORG v Labcon index. The Labcon can be a red and blue dotted line. SLORG can be unfairly represented by a dotted line of rats in a sack fighting over Galloway's hat.
So bets on the date of SLORG crossover? I don't actually think that'll happen because even a small Tory recovery will put paid to it. But it would fascinating to see.
A pedant writes: as SLORG=100%-Labcon, a graph of SLORG vs Labcon would be two mirrored lines. You just need to depict Labcon and see when it dips below 50%.
This is of course true but without two lines you can't have a proper crossover.
But the crossover will always have to be at 50%.
If we include don't knows and will not votes when we can make it more interesting
Well, it does if you follow five or six obsessive bores on PB! I honestly haven’t heard a single person mention FROCKGATE IRL.
It's Covent Garden-Gate!
This is the rather bizarre post on the last thread in reply to my admission that during the GE campaign I had given Labour £100.....
Jessop:
£100 is nowhere near enough. £100 gets you put on the list of mugs who donate. You are one of thousands. At best, you will be forgotten. At medium, you will be pestered by them for future donations. At worst, you will be pestered by many people (*).
But £20,000 is different. That is a different list. They will care for you. They will nurture you. You may be invited to events; the larger the figure, the greater the events. They will want more money from you, so will want to know what *you* want. And therein lies the start of potential corruption.
And Alli has given far, far more than £20,000 to Labour figures. Apparently, that buys you a voice in candidate selection and a Number 10 pass...
(*) If you give to certain charities, you can suddenly start getting pestered by other charities. It's almost as though the mug list is shared amongst them...
Why is that bizarre? Go on, educate me.
The effects of scale are very difficult to understand
Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi has resigned the whip, saying the party has moved too far right
Avg % who described Tories as "very right wing" under Cameron (as PM): 14% May: 15% Johnson: 18% Truss: no data, tenure too short to coincide with tracker Sunak: 21% https://x.com/YouGov/status/1839587245298246051
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Without toss-ups, Yougov has Harris winning 276-262, which is in line with current State polling.
Not too long ago, a lead of 3% could give you a 100 seat lead in the EC.
What would the EC score be if there were a 3% Republican lead?
Whatever one thinks about the idea that the flyover states shouldn't be overlooked, an electoral system where some bits of geography carry more clout per voter than others is an awfully rum one.
It makes sense for a Federal state as opposed to a Unitary state. Britain is a Unitary state, so it doesn't make much sense to us.
I couldn't say to what extent most Americans view themselves as citizens of their State, taking a collective decision as Texans, or Michiganders, who they would like to be President, as opposed to a collective decision as Americans. Arguably the US has become predominantly a Unitary state over the centuries, and the voting system for President is an anachronism from its Federal origins.
If the EU were to start electing [one of] its Presidents directly I think an Electoral College system might be the best place to start, rather than a simple direct vote.
The Swiss, for example, have an even less direct system, though. The Italian President is also indirectly elected. Also the German President.
I think there are lots of Presidents who aren't elected by a simple majority vote among adult citizens.
But those tend to be Presidents with relatively little power, unlike the US President. The Swiss, German and Italian President are nothing like the US President.
Yes. I think it's a bigger problem to have an election, by any method, for one individual who is then vested with so much power.
But, still, there wasn't a qualifier about whether the President was an Executive President in your original statement. I think my point that lots of Presidents are not directly elected by majority vote of a universal franchise is a valid one.
I just hope Keir had access to a top notch power shower (however funded) after the meeting.
Are you not better than childish teenager 'jokes'? Why would he need a top notch power shower?
Have you not heard the expression, "I felt I needed a shower" from someone after they've had to meet a particularly nasty piece of work in the line of business?
Personally no, perhaps the people I know and work with are just very professional in how they conduct themselves.
It's just a variation on "you should count your fingers after you've shaken hands with him".
Not heard that one either?
Only from people who laugh at their own jokes and think they are funny.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
Probably best to do it before he dies. Also tell him you love him.
I tell them both. I should just do so more often.
Incidentally, I still remember the occasion I first told my parents that I loved them. I'd told them many times before, of course, but this is the first time I went out of my way, as an adult, to say so. Not as part of an existing conversation, or as an addendum to saying goodnight, but as a deliberate, single act.
I had a schoolfriend who ended up going to the same uni as me. In fact, we ended up on differing floors of the same halls of residence tower block. One day I commented on some slight scars on his back, which I had seen many times before at school.
"Oh," he said. "That's where my dad beat me."
This led to a long conversation, in which he told me that his dad was a bit of a sh*t and that his homelife was complex. I'd sorta gathered much of this before, but it was the first time he told me the depths of the story.
After I left his room, I went to the hall's phone stalls, phones my mum and dad, and told them I loved them, and I thanked them for everything they'd done for me.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
Govt intervenes to save Newton Aycliffe chip factory involved in defence industry.
"British chip factory involved in sensitive military projects has been nationalised by the Ministry of Defence following warnings that it was at risk of closure.
The Government confirmed on Friday that it had purchased the site in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, from US company Coherent."
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
If you want a shock and and to see how, for decades, the US has treated tariffs look at the cotton trade. Truly shocking. If you live in sub-Saharan Africa.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
It’s something terrible like that
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Spent several happy years in Norwich and thus visited the East coast a fair bit. The only reservation I have about it is weird - I hate the sun setting over the land - it should set out to seas (as it does when I holiday in North Devon). Otherwise its excellent. The Yorkshire has a lot to recommend it - plenty of great geology and fossil hunting, stunning scenery etc.
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
It’s something terrible like that
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
Happens a lot with chefs trying to pursue fine dining dreams in small provincial towns too. Always sad.
It's shockingly disrepectful to call Trump supporters with legitimate concerns batshit crazy.
Also:
Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski As Tucker Carlson’s tour rolls on, headliner Roseanne Barr tells a cheering audience that the elites are eating babies and are vampires who drink blood and love the taste of human flesh but Trump is going to stop it.
I suggest a new tracker is needed, maybe even with a red and blue dotted line, starting from GE of 2017. On that day, not so long ago, the Lab/Con combined support was 82.3%. At GE 2024 it was 57.4%. In this poll it is 54%.
There must be a point at which this plummeting figure becomes game changing. So which way it goes is important. One to watch.
Though that poll surprises me. For LRG to remain flat given the Labour tribulations and the paucity of decent Tory leadership candidates is a poor show.
LRG? Or does GLR sounds better? LRG perhaps too similar sounding to LLG. Or do we add SNP and other too? I think we should
SLORG (the). The SLORG has stayed flat on 46%
SLORG it is. The SLORG v Labcon index. The Labcon can be a red and blue dotted line. SLORG can be unfairly represented by a dotted line of rats in a sack fighting over Galloway's hat.
So bets on the date of SLORG crossover? I don't actually think that'll happen because even a small Tory recovery will put paid to it. But it would fascinating to see.
A pedant writes: as SLORG=100%-Labcon, a graph of SLORG vs Labcon would be two mirrored lines. You just need to depict Labcon and see when it dips below 50%.
This is of course true but without two lines you can't have a proper crossover.
But the crossover will always have to be at 50%.
This is of course true, but the sight of crossover is what it is. Points on railway lines are always at the same place but you still have to go over them and into one direction or another.
I don't think a set of 17 year olds doing A levels at a college have a clue on how to repair a local flooded road...
More to the point, even if they really don't have flooded roads in their own parish not fifty miles away from home they could join something like Fix the Fells and work with volunteers to repair Footpaths in both the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales - visit the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust website for further details.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
West coast is very special though. Aran. Bute. Cowal Peninsula. You don't mind the showers every 5 minutes - it's part of the magic.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Here is the climate of Whaletown, British Columbia. It does look oddly similar to London
I used to imagine we had a climate like Vancouver. We don’t. Vancouver gets way more sun
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
West coast is very special though. Aran. Bute. Cowal Peninsula. You don't mind the showers every 5 minutes - it's part of the magic.
Yes. The Hebrides benefit from the constantly changing weather - you might be in 60mph winds and getting blown off your bicycle, but 10 minutes later you're swimming off a deserted beach and napping on the machair.
In some respects the bad weather is an attraction. These enormous uniform banks of cloud sweeping in from the Atlantic - you've just got to make it to the ferry terminal between them!
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Spent several happy years in Norwich and thus visited the East coast a fair bit. The only reservation I have about it is weird - I hate the sun setting over the land - it should set out to seas (as it does when I holiday in North Devon). Otherwise its excellent. The Yorkshire has a lot to recommend it - plenty of great geology and fossil hunting, stunning scenery etc.
Go while stocks last. Large parts of it are vanishing under the sea. last time I visited Happisburgh (pronounced Chol-mond-ley) it felt a bit sad and elegiac.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
'roasted' is the key word here, I think.
Yes. The value added bit is protected within the EU, attacking opportunity for some of the world's poorest.
I don't think a set of 17 year olds doing A levels at a college have a clue on how to repair a local flooded road...
More to the point, even if they really don't have flooded roads in their own parish not fifty miles away from home they could join something like Fix the Fells and work with volunteers to repair Footpaths in both the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales - visit the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust website for further details.
Far better to engage in a bit of "white knighting" to feel worthy while having a holiday in an exotic place I guess.
I don't think a set of 17 year olds doing A levels at a college have a clue on how to repair a local flooded road...
More to the point, even if they really don't have flooded roads in their own parish not fifty miles away from home they could join something like Fix the Fells and work with volunteers to repair Footpaths in both the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales - visit the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust website for further details.
I like how it says they went on a trip to learn to cook on a budget.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
No, because it always becomes protectionist and dog eats dog, if you tax international production more than domestic, with the poorest countries having the least chance to protect themselves from it. It's a power grab and the basis of mercantilism. There is no problem in taxing goods and services once within a national economy - by VAT etc.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Here is the climate of Whaletown, British Columbia. It does look oddly similar to London
I used to imagine we had a climate like Vancouver. We don’t. Vancouver gets way more sun
It will be interesting to see how much it changes over the next 50 years. The recent flooding here and in the rest of Europe is just "weather", but as it becomes more frequent...
It's the volatility that we should be worried about rather than the gradual change. Not really set up for droughts and monsoons.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
That has to be because it's right on the Pacific Coast, while London is 700km east of where Atlantic storms make landfall on the West Ireland coast. But, of course, while Carrauntoohil is a fine mountain in its own right, it has nothing on the Rocky Mountains, so you can't find a spot 700km inland from the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic coast that will fit as an analogue.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Spent several happy years in Norwich and thus visited the East coast a fair bit. The only reservation I have about it is weird - I hate the sun setting over the land - it should set out to seas (as it does when I holiday in North Devon). Otherwise its excellent. The Yorkshire has a lot to recommend it - plenty of great geology and fossil hunting, stunning scenery etc.
If you go to Hunstanton on the east coast, the sun sets in the right place. It's remarkable.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
The roasting adds value, right? So the tariff would incentivise the import of green coffee beans and their local roasting, maybe.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
It’s something terrible like that
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
Yes. But now the location has a restaurant-grade kitchen the chances are someone else will try again. And again. And again.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
My instinct here is that such a long sentence is disproportionate (particularly given much worse driving is often let off - see Emma Newman in Glasgow) , but again the driving ban is too short.
I don't think a set of 17 year olds doing A levels at a college have a clue on how to repair a local flooded road...
More to the point, even if they really don't have flooded roads in their own parish not fifty miles away from home they could join something like Fix the Fells and work with volunteers to repair Footpaths in both the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales - visit the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust website for further details.
I like how it says they went on a trip to learn to cook on a budget.
This is YORKSHIRE; why is that not genetic?
The school is actually in County Durham*. They're not so frugal up there
Given the web page calls it a Yorkshire Expedition, I wouldn't send my kids there to study geography!
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
Of course. Historically, it was the largest source of revenue for the United States, at the start of its existence as independent country. But the debate over the essential purpose of tariffs hasn't really changed - rather it's the appreciation of the economic benefits of free trade which came to dominate.
https://www.taxnotes.com/tax-history-project/tax-history-why-tax-people-should-care-about-tariffs/2024/06/14/7kcdj ...these goals have never been exclusive of one another, although they can often work at cross-purposes. A single law can serve several ends, as Congress made clear in 1789 when it emphasized the need for both revenue and restriction. Tariffs, the lawmakers wrote in the first tariff law’s preamble, were “necessary for the support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection of manufactures.”
While Irwin’s three objectives can coexist, one or another tends to dominate for long stretches. Accordingly, Irwin has periodized the history of American trade policy into three long eras, each dominated by a single objective.
During the first era, stretching from 1789 to the beginning of the Civil War, tariffs were designed to raise revenue, as the young nation cast about for ways to pay its bills. In the second era, lasting from 1861 to 1933, policymakers focused on restriction, using tariffs to shield domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. And in the third era, beginning in 1934 under President Franklin Roosevelt, policymakers sought to encourage reciprocity, negotiating bilateral and multilateral agreements to lower trade barriers around the globe.
Irwin’s periodization is more than just impressionistic; by measuring the average tariff on dutiable goods (tariff revenue divided by the value of total dutiable imports), he identified the three eras by charting their relative emphasis on protectionism. “The average tariff on dutiable imports can be interpreted, somewhat simplistically but still usefully, as the average degree of protection given to domestic producers facing foreign competition,” he explained.
“In the revenue period, from 1790 to 1860, average tariffs rose from about 20 percent to 60 percent and then fell back down to 20 percent,” Irwin wrote. “In the restriction period, from 1861 to 1933, the average tariff on dutiable imports jumped to 50 percent and remained at about that level for several decades. In the reciprocity period, from 1934 to the present, the average tariff fell sharply and then leveled off at about 5 percent.”..
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
That has to be because it's right on the Pacific Coast, while London is 700km east of where Atlantic storms make landfall on the West Ireland coast. But, of course, while Carrauntoohil is a fine mountain in its own right, it has nothing on the Rocky Mountains, so you can't find a spot 700km inland from the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic coast that will fit as an analogue.
London is sui generis again.
I’m having a good go
Bella Bella, further north on that BC coast, looks even closer. Notably greyer than Vancouver. Generally rainy and cool with nagging winds, but the occasional burst of really hot summer weather - AKA the New British Climate
Time to stop playing the working class card Angela.
Rayner seems to be the ideal working class person for the upper and middle class to use to show they are not class prejudiced. I cannot hate the working class. I like Ange.
Of course working class people who rioted, many of whom were not motivated by race, but deprivation, poverty or wanting a ruck with Plod are looked down on as are the areas they come from. Good piece in the Guardian on this today.
"Angela Rayner makes a lot of being working class. In fact when those grisly images came back from Ibiza this summer of Ange in a rave, she said it was because she was working class, and the working classes like to party. No, Ange; we’re conflating two things here. There are your personal proclivities and there are the attributes of the working class and they’re not the same. In fact, the Deputy PM is getting away with murder on the back of her self-description as working class. It’s a way of seeing off criticism of her personal judgment as class-based snobbiness."
Absolutely the above, and I care nothing for her dancing badly in Ibiza.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
It’s something terrible like that
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
Yes. But now the location has a restaurant-grade kitchen the chances are someone else will try again. And again. And again.
Or Leon could move there, and never eat out again...
Without toss-ups, Yougov has Harris winning 276-262, which is in line with current State polling.
Not too long ago, a lead of 3% could give you a 100 seat lead in the EC.
What would the EC score be if there were a 3% Republican lead?
Whatever one thinks about the idea that the flyover states shouldn't be overlooked, an electoral system where some bits of geography carry more clout per voter than others is an awfully rum one.
With a 3% Republican lead, my States model gives 354-184 to Trump.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Spent several happy years in Norwich and thus visited the East coast a fair bit. The only reservation I have about it is weird - I hate the sun setting over the land - it should set out to seas (as it does when I holiday in North Devon). Otherwise its excellent. The Yorkshire has a lot to recommend it - plenty of great geology and fossil hunting, stunning scenery etc.
If you go to Hunstanton on the east coast, the sun sets in the right place. It's remarkable.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Spent several happy years in Norwich and thus visited the East coast a fair bit. The only reservation I have about it is weird - I hate the sun setting over the land - it should set out to seas (as it does when I holiday in North Devon). Otherwise its excellent. The Yorkshire has a lot to recommend it - plenty of great geology and fossil hunting, stunning scenery etc.
I'm entirely with you. It shouldn't matter, because I live 30 miles inland and the sun always sets over the land anyway - but to me, the light feels all wrong on the east coast.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
No, because it always becomes protectionist and dog eats dog, if you tax international production more than domestic, with the poorest countries having the least chance to protect themselves from it. It's a power grab and the basis of mercantilism. There is no problem in taxing goods and services once within a national economy - by VAT etc.
I don't think it's ever been quite as simple as that (though in broad terms I tend to agree with you).
This is the rather bizarre post on the last thread in reply to my admission that during the GE campaign I had given Labour £100.....
Jessop:
£100 is nowhere near enough. £100 gets you put on the list of mugs who donate. You are one of thousands. At best, you will be forgotten. At medium, you will be pestered by them for future donations. At worst, you will be pestered by many people (*).
But £20,000 is different. That is a different list. They will care for you. They will nurture you. You may be invited to events; the larger the figure, the greater the events. They will want more money from you, so will want to know what *you* want. And therein lies the start of potential corruption.
And Alli has given far, far more than £20,000 to Labour figures. Apparently, that buys you a voice in candidate selection and a Number 10 pass...
(*) If you give to certain charities, you can suddenly start getting pestered by other charities. It's almost as though the mug list is shared amongst them...
When Maurice Saatchi next has his brainstorming session in his Chateau on Cap Ferrat I'll make sure this is posted on his ENORMOUS gates.
I see what you did there Roger, you little tinker, you doubled up a devastatingly incisive political comment with a nudge-nudge that you actually don’t just know where Maurice Saatchi lives, (not far from you natch) but he has enormous gates.
Most people would drop in how well they know Maurice or let slip an anecdote about when they were at a party at his mansion on Cap Ferrat but you trump that by knowing he has big gates, even better than actually being invited past them.
I don't know Maurice Saatchi though I have worked for his various agencies. No, the reason is more prosaic.
I was using a French location finder in the area once and she showed me her book of locations. She came to one and said 'You'll know the owner of this house. It's Maurice Saatchi'.
'Why would someone like Maurice Saatchi rent his house out for film shoots? I asked He's extremely rich and he knows what a film crew can do' She said 'All my clients are extremely rich and however much money they have it's never enough. That's how they stay rich'!
So when I was thinking of the absurd story of Covent Garden Gate. I remembered that Saatchi was Chairman of the Tory Party and well known for his brain storming sessions. He probably gave a ton of money to the Tory Party as well and he was enobled. In fact as I thought about it I was going to reply to Jessop and tell him he had a point!
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
A pedant notes that coffee grows in the EU in Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Mayotte, Saint Martin, the Canary Islands and places like New Caledonia.
Given that most of these are French, it is entirely possible that the whole EU tax system is distorted to protect the interests of about 43 people growing 0.00000000000000002% of the coffee drunk in Europe.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
On the other hand I often find myself peering out over the same sorts of scenes coming into Heathrow and thinking "bloody hell why do I live in this shit climate?". It's particularly marked on days when the clouds are low and drizzly, the rain streaks are sliding across the portholes, and the green and grey of the London suburbs only comes into view between foggy grey cloudbanks about 30 seconds before touchdown.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
The roasting adds value, right? So the tariff would incentivise the import of green coffee beans and their local roasting, maybe.
They grow coffee in the Canary Islands (I’ve had it and it’s nice). That’s part of the EU via Spain
If you include French possessions like French Guyana they DEFFO grow coffee
This is the rather bizarre post on the last thread in reply to my admission that during the GE campaign I had given Labour £100.....
Jessop:
£100 is nowhere near enough. £100 gets you put on the list of mugs who donate. You are one of thousands. At best, you will be forgotten. At medium, you will be pestered by them for future donations. At worst, you will be pestered by many people (*).
But £20,000 is different. That is a different list. They will care for you. They will nurture you. You may be invited to events; the larger the figure, the greater the events. They will want more money from you, so will want to know what *you* want. And therein lies the start of potential corruption.
And Alli has given far, far more than £20,000 to Labour figures. Apparently, that buys you a voice in candidate selection and a Number 10 pass...
(*) If you give to certain charities, you can suddenly start getting pestered by other charities. It's almost as though the mug list is shared amongst them...
When Maurice Saatchi next has his brainstorming session in his Chateau on Cap Ferrat I'll make sure this is posted on his ENORMOUS gates.
I see what you did there Roger, you little tinker, you doubled up a devastatingly incisive political comment with a nudge-nudge that you actually don’t just know where Maurice Saatchi lives, (not far from you natch) but he has enormous gates.
Most people would drop in how well they know Maurice or let slip an anecdote about when they were at a party at his mansion on Cap Ferrat but you trump that by knowing he has big gates, even better than actually being invited past them.
I don't know Maurice Saatchi though I have worked for his various agencies. No, the reason is more prosaic.
I was using a French location finder in the area once and she showed me her book of locations. She came to one and said 'You'll know the owner of this house. It's Maurice Saatchi'.
'Why would someone like Maurice Saatchi rent his house out for film shoots? I asked He's extremely rich and he knows what a film crew can do' She said 'All my clients are extremely rich and however much money they have it's never enough. That's how they stay rich'!
So when I was thinking of the absurd story of Covent Garden Gate. I remembered that Saatchi was Chairman of the Tory Party and well known for his brain storming sessions. He probably gave a ton of money to the Tory Party as well and he was enobled. In fact as I thought about it I was going to reply to Jessop and tell him he had a point!
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
Beautifully put and so sadly untrue
I do genuinely enjoy arriving back to a dull grey mild day, and I wouldn't want it any less wet, because I do genuinely love the greenness of the UK and the west of it in particular. But I will quietly concede I wouldn't mind a bit more blue sky - just as much rain, but rather more concentrated. I'd also like a bit more snow in winter. Britain never looks better than when covered in snow.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
It’s something terrible like that
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
Yes. But now the location has a restaurant-grade kitchen the chances are someone else will try again. And again. And again.
Not necessarily. If it folded owing a lot of money, the creditors might have ripped the kitchen fittings out for resale. That happened to a restaurant near me.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
Beautifully put and so sadly untrue
I do genuinely enjoy arriving back to a dull grey mild day, and I wouldn't want it any less wet, because I do genuinely love the greenness of the UK and the west of it in particular. But I will quietly concede I wouldn't mind a bit more blue sky - just as much rain, but rather more concentrated. I'd also like a bit more snow in winter. Britain never looks better than when covered in snow.
I genuinely envy your ability to enjoy our weather
I sometimes wonder if my endless pro travel has spoiled me. ie I’ve been to so many lovely places with lovely climates it’s made me overly critical of British damp and grey, which isn’t THAT bad
But then I remember my first Mediterranean holiday aged about seven and how that warm consistent sun made me instantly happier, and how I felt - even aged seven - “my God, this is what weather is meant to be like, this is my kind of world” - so maybe I was born in the wrong climate and all my travels since have been at attempt to escape it
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
The roasting adds value, right? So the tariff would incentivise the import of green coffee beans and their local roasting, maybe.
They grow coffee in the Canary Islands (I’ve had it and it’s nice). That’s part of the EU via Spain
If you include French possessions like French Guyana they DEFFO grow coffee
The EU also has a series of preferential tariff rates (some going down to zero) under its generalised scheme of preferences (GSP) regime with a number of developing countries that meet certain criteria on labour rights, sustainability, being generally nice to the EU, and so on.
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Not a bad ad from Harris. She did an early one about the Proud Boys and Trumps part in the riots which was more powerful. It showed the venality and chaos he's likely to bring to Office
January 6th is going to become a major live issue before the election - ironically, down to the Supreme Court ruling on Trump's immunity.
Basically, they sent it back to the judge, saying there must be a hearing to determine those acts which were part of Trump's actions in his capacity as President - and those which were not. Normally the evidence would be limited to 40 pages. Here though, the judge has said that there must be a full review of ALL the evidence - to comply with the Supreme Court's requirements. So nearer to 200 pages of the allegations of what Trump did around January 6th have been deposited with the court. These will then be reviewed and as far as required, be redacted before being released as court papers.
And visible to all.
So we are going to have a wealth of detail of what Trump did or did not do. Much of this will be testimony not previously in the public domain. Trump's lawyers have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent this release. But they keep coming upon the same - ironic - brick wall: will of the Supreme Court.
Certain sections of the media are going to run and run and run and run with this.
January 6th is one area where rather flaky Republicans and especially Indepenednets are not inclined to give Trump a pass. If it look like his actions support the proposition he did all he could to ensure the success of the January 6th insurrectionsists, it will make it very difficult for him to claim they are "hostages". He could consequently lose a few points going in to the final weeks or even days of the campaign. Those are a few points he can't afford to lose.
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Labour will spin next year’s locals as good for Labour as they were last held in 2021 which was peak Boris.
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
I presume that Labour campaigners and supporters are just not motivated. They’ve seen Labour win decisively in the general election. They must feel job done, no need to bother with a local by-election. Turnouts in many of these by-elections are very low: no-one is that bothered. That leaves open a window of opportunity for parties who are feeling motivated.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
The roasting adds value, right? So the tariff would incentivise the import of green coffee beans and their local roasting, maybe.
I wonder if that varies by import country?
Under the principles of EU development law etc, one would expect certain countries to be exempt to encourage investment there.
For the best coffee, roasting has to be local. Though checking an Aldi bag'o'beans from my coffee cupboard I see the use by date is June 2026.
Green coffee imports to EU, then roast here, are nearly all of it:
Europe has a huge roasting industry. Therefore, most imported coffee is green coffee. In 2023, Europe imported 3 million tonnes of green coffee (caffeinated and decaffeinated combined). This is a huge amount, compared to the 10.7 thousand tonnes of roasted coffee. https://www.cbi.eu/market-information/coffee/roasted-coffee/market-potential
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Labour is generally not very good at council byelections. I noticed that in the last parliament. Tories are often quite resilient in office except when faced with Lib Dems. Byelections tend to be good for LDs, Greens and independents.
I think part of that is about brand. Labour's brand really isn't very local governmenty. It's all about national level politics and metro-mayors. Whereas often Tory councillors are well known local businesspeople or farmers. I think they'll make good progress at the next locals, much more so (outside a very narrow range of seats) than Reform.
If I were classifying the GB-wide parties based on national vs local focus I'd go:
Lab: 80:20 N:L Con: 65:35 Ref: 90:10 (though may change as they develop a regional base) LD: 35:65 Green: 20:80
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
Perhaps some grifter psychology in there too. They think selling is winning and buying is for suckers (which in their game it is). Extending to international trade this means if you buy from a foreign country that country has 'won' and you have 'lost'.
My dad was a reasonably successful SME businessman. He employed a few people, built a few things; knocked down a few more.
He said that the best sort of deal you could do was one where both parties left thinking they had a good deal. His business relied on people coming back with more jobs. If they felt he was fair, then they would do so. If they felt he was unfair, they were far less likely to. But that way, you eventually run out of clients.
Occasionally he would make a mistake with an estimate and the job would cost more, and most times the client would know, that as he was fair, he was not screwing with them. Other times he would come in under estimate, and he would sometimes slightly reduce the bill as a result. He had relationships with clients that lasted forty or more years.
Oh, and honesty as well. If you fuck up, explain why the job went wrong, clearly and honestly.
Did he make as much money on each job? No. Did he make more money in the long run? Probably.
Trump's magic has been to grift from the same people over and over again.
When I was growing up in Oxford, there was a shitty nightclub in the Westgate centre.
This went bust on a regular basis, and then reappeared. Strangely the ownership was moderately consistent.
The ability to order stuff on account, for the various reincarnations, was startling.
The popular theories were either (1) Brown envelopes, (2) The managers at the various breweries etc changed and their successors didn't have a clue.
Older PB-ers might recall my mentioning, a year or two ago, a gleaming new restaurant opening a few doors from my flat, and how I was convinced it would fail because
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers 2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?! 3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
Don't something like two thirds of new restaurants/cafes fail within the first year or so ?
It’s something terrible like that
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
Yes. But now the location has a restaurant-grade kitchen the chances are someone else will try again. And again. And again.
Not necessarily. If it folded owing a lot of money, the creditors might have ripped the kitchen fittings out for resale. That happened to a restaurant near me.
It happened to a friend of mine. You buy the lease for say £100,000 and pay rent to the landlord of say £10,000 a month. When you start losing money you are left with a lease that you have to get rid of for whatever anyone will pay so you're not stuck with the rent
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Labour will spin next year’s locals as good for Labour as they were last held in 2021 which was peak Boris.
The 2025 locals will be greatly impacted by how many candidates Reform are able to field.
If you want to see something Nostradamus-like, watch this BBC programme from 1979 about the effect of computers on society, especially the last few minutes.
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Sir Keir is left with no choice but to console himself with a parliamentary majority of 174.
Russia appears to have successfully deterred the US from allowing Ukraine to use Western weaponry to strike military targets deep inside Russia.
Meanwhile, NATO member Hungary has said that they would not have resisted a Russian invasion of their country, and Ukraine shouldn't have done so either.
Today does not feel like a good day for the collective defence of democracies against authoritarians.
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
This seems the right thing to do on so many levels. I wonder what the funding implications are, though.
The biggest cost will be providing training places within the NHS. The degrees are a fraction of that.
Don't we need to have a load more doctors in order to train a load more doctors?
Probably. There are quite a few bits of the British state where the old "well, if you're wanting to go to Dublin, I wouldn't be starting from here" joke applies.
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
I presume that Labour campaigners and supporters are just not motivated. They’ve seen Labour win decisively in the general election. They must feel job done, no need to bother with a local by-election. Turnouts in many of these by-elections are very low: no-one is that bothered. That leaves open a window of opportunity for parties who are feeling motivated.
Or these by elections reflect the abject and record breaking plunge in Starmer’s popularity, which we see in all the polls
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
Beautifully put and so sadly untrue
I do genuinely enjoy arriving back to a dull grey mild day, and I wouldn't want it any less wet, because I do genuinely love the greenness of the UK and the west of it in particular. But I will quietly concede I wouldn't mind a bit more blue sky - just as much rain, but rather more concentrated. I'd also like a bit more snow in winter. Britain never looks better than when covered in snow.
I genuinely envy your ability to enjoy our weather
I sometimes wonder if my endless pro travel has spoiled me. ie I’ve been to so many lovely places with lovely climates it’s made me overly critical of British damp and grey, which isn’t THAT bad
But then I remember my first Mediterranean holiday aged about seven and how that warm consistent sun made me instantly happier, and how I felt - even aged seven - “my God, this is what weather is meant to be like, this is my kind of world” - so maybe I was born in the wrong climate and all my travels since have been at attempt to escape it
I’d have more time for your baleful meteorological vignettes did you post when the English weather was good. As it was, for instance, for much of the earlier part of this month. It changed pretty much on the equinox, as the season itself changed from summer to autumn. Yet all we heard from you at the time was VANCOUVER.
The idea that a green and pleasant land exposed to the whims of the North Atlantic should have the climate of the south of France is, er, somewhat niche.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
No, because it always becomes protectionist and dog eats dog, if you tax international production more than domestic, with the poorest countries having the least chance to protect themselves from it. It's a power grab and the basis of mercantilism. There is no problem in taxing goods and services once within a national economy - by VAT etc.
One problem we have is that Donald Trump believes (or at least, he used to) that VAT is a protectionist measure against American exporters.
"The NHS must no longer “nick” people from abroad to staff the health service, Wes Streeting has said.
The Health Secretary has pledged that he will reduce the NHS’ “overreliance” on migrants to staff the health service and will train “our own homegrown talent”."
This seems the right thing to do on so many levels. I wonder what the funding implications are, though.
The biggest cost will be providing training places within the NHS. The degrees are a fraction of that.
Don't we need to have a load more doctors in order to train a load more doctors?
Probably. There are quite a few bits of the British state where the old "well, if you're wanting to go to Dublin, I wouldn't be starting from here" joke applies.
It strikes me as an ambitious thing for Streeting to be announcing with the finances as they are.
I think in the long run this is the sort of thing this government will be judged on. They are promising two sets of things: serious, accountable government; and providing (imo sensible) long term solutions to thorny problems.
Based on experiences of the last generation of governments I believe this one is over promising and will underdeliver. If they prove me wrong then I think they deserve to be in power for a generation.
If they fail I think we'll just slide further into the cheap political wins of populist politics such as that of Reform and the Greens (SLORG if you will).
This is the rather bizarre post on the last thread in reply to my admission that during the GE campaign I had given Labour £100.....
Jessop:
£100 is nowhere near enough. £100 gets you put on the list of mugs who donate. You are one of thousands. At best, you will be forgotten. At medium, you will be pestered by them for future donations. At worst, you will be pestered by many people (*).
But £20,000 is different. That is a different list. They will care for you. They will nurture you. You may be invited to events; the larger the figure, the greater the events. They will want more money from you, so will want to know what *you* want. And therein lies the start of potential corruption.
And Alli has given far, far more than £20,000 to Labour figures. Apparently, that buys you a voice in candidate selection and a Number 10 pass...
(*) If you give to certain charities, you can suddenly start getting pestered by other charities. It's almost as though the mug list is shared amongst them...
When Maurice Saatchi next has his brainstorming session in his Chateau on Cap Ferrat I'll make sure this is posted on his gate.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Spent several happy years in Norwich and thus visited the East coast a fair bit. The only reservation I have about it is weird - I hate the sun setting over the land - it should set out to seas (as it does when I holiday in North Devon). Otherwise its excellent. The Yorkshire has a lot to recommend it - plenty of great geology and fossil hunting, stunning scenery etc.
Go while stocks last. Large parts of it are vanishing under the sea. last time I visited Happisburgh (pronounced Chol-mond-ley) it felt a bit sad and elegiac.
Used to go to the midsummer beer festival at Hayesbrough (Happisburgh). In some ways its sad seeing the coast erode, but its all natural processes and what gives rise to new lands elsewhere.
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Labour will spin next year’s locals as good for Labour as they were last held in 2021 which was peak Boris.
The 2025 locals will be greatly impacted by how many candidates Reform are able to field.
Partly that would be about having that sort of party organsiation on the ground. But also- how far are Reform supporters motivated by the sort of responsibiliites that local councils have?
The one to watch for Reform might be the new Linconshire mayorality. (How can counties have Mayors? They should be called Sheriffs, or if you want proper romanticism, Counts.)
All the council by-elections looking piss poor for Labour. Now it's obviously normal for a Gov't to go backwards in mid-term (And we haven't reached those) council elections, but Starmer clearly wanted to get to mid term unpopularity early
Sir Keir is left with no choice but to console himself with a parliamentary majority of 174.
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
Beautifully put and so sadly untrue
I do genuinely enjoy arriving back to a dull grey mild day, and I wouldn't want it any less wet, because I do genuinely love the greenness of the UK and the west of it in particular. But I will quietly concede I wouldn't mind a bit more blue sky - just as much rain, but rather more concentrated. I'd also like a bit more snow in winter. Britain never looks better than when covered in snow.
I genuinely envy your ability to enjoy our weather
I sometimes wonder if my endless pro travel has spoiled me. ie I’ve been to so many lovely places with lovely climates it’s made me overly critical of British damp and grey, which isn’t THAT bad
But then I remember my first Mediterranean holiday aged about seven and how that warm consistent sun made me instantly happier, and how I felt - even aged seven - “my God, this is what weather is meant to be like, this is my kind of world” - so maybe I was born in the wrong climate and all my travels since have been at attempt to escape it
Quite a lot of people like our climate because they dislike heat. This is not a fashionable view, perhaps because it isn't possible to commercialise or advertise the concept of liking rather boring middling weather - outside temperature at say 16-21 C.
I’ve spoken to a half dozen people who worked on economic policy in the Trump administration — most of whom are somewhat reluctantly voting for him again — who all say that Trump is a mercantilist who believes, sincerely but wrongly, that imports subtract from GDP.
That’s why he likes tariffs.
This is a widely held, but incorrect, view of how trade works and Trump is one of the people who holds it.
The various efforts to backfill some other explanation of why he wants a 20% tax on Kenyan coffee and bananas from Central America are embarrassing — stop humiliating yourselves. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1839443238421467235
One would have thought that the Yanks, of all people, would know better than to put taxes on tea or coffee.
Yes, bananas.
The EU taxes imports of roasted coffee, a purely protectionist measure.
There are no EU growers of coffee, to my knowledge, so which industry is being "protected" by tariffs on coffee imports?
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
No, because it always becomes protectionist and dog eats dog, if you tax international production more than domestic, with the poorest countries having the least chance to protect themselves from it. It's a power grab and the basis of mercantilism. There is no problem in taxing goods and services once within a national economy - by VAT etc.
One problem we have is that Donald Trump believes (or at least, he used to) that VAT is a protectionist measure against American exporters.
The VAT consequences of Brexit were certainly a self imposed protectionist measure against our own exporters.
Point of order. Starmer hasn't embezzled anything. Unlike people associated with the Conservative Party who stole £15 billion from the State in dodgy Covid contracts.
No journalists (to my knowledge) have pointed out that if you run a business and received £100k worth of freebies you might be in trouble under the Bribery Act and you almost certainly would have top pay Benefit in Kind tax. As he is already in the 45% bracket it means he ought to get a tax bill of £45k
Any accountants in that want to comment? Am I right?
Point of order. Starmer hasn't embezzled anything. Unlike people associated with the Conservative Party who stole £15 billion from the State in dodgy Covid contracts.
No journalists (to my knowledge) have pointed out that if you run a business and received £100k worth of freebies you might be in trouble under the Bribery Act and you almost certainly would have top pay Benefit in Kind tax. As he is already in the 45% bracket it means he ought to get a tax bill of £45k
Any accountants in that want to comment? Am I right?
I could quote you the relevant tax rules issued by HMRC but as a broad rule, if you are not an employee of the hospitality provider there is no BIK arising.
Why ale house accountants continue to post such rubbish is beyond me.
The provision of 10 Downing Street as accommodation is a BIK and if you google it you will find Sunaks broad tax details
Thanks for your clarification but no need to be a partisan pompous dick about it.
In my view BIK or capital gains or some sort of tax on this type of value, particularly when it relates to a gift that is given because someone is a minister of state, should apply. If I attempted to claim clothing through my business on the dubious claim I needed to "look smart for my work" I would pay BIK. Starmer's view (and perhaps yours) is clearly that all those in the public sector, including himself, should be given special treatment.
Anyhow, I think I'd rather be "an ale house account" than a real one!! In the words of John Cleese: "Well, er, yes Mr. Anchovy, but you see your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon."
In your view != what the law says.
Is this not a site where people give opinions? It might be a loophole that Starmer wriggles his hypocritical, but nontheless well dressed person through. If a business person would get hammered for BIK for trying to put his/her suits through the books, the same should apply to our politicians. Personally I couldn't give a shit about the football attendance (politicians go to these types of events), it is the greedy tasteless extravagance on clothjng and the double standard that is clearly being demonstrated.
law you don't like != loophole
Erm - the whole idea of being in a parliamentary democracy is that laws that are inequitable can and should be changed. Politicians believing that different rules apply to them then those of us that they apply laws to, is not a good look for said democracy.
Point of order. Starmer hasn't embezzled anything. Unlike people associated with the Conservative Party who stole £15 billion from the State in dodgy Covid contracts.
No journalists (to my knowledge) have pointed out that if you run a business and received £100k worth of freebies you might be in trouble under the Bribery Act and you almost certainly would have top pay Benefit in Kind tax. As he is already in the 45% bracket it means he ought to get a tax bill of £45k
Any accountants in that want to comment? Am I right?
Point of order. Starmer hasn't embezzled anything. Unlike people associated with the Conservative Party who stole £15 billion from the State in dodgy Covid contracts.
No journalists (to my knowledge) have pointed out that if you run a business and received £100k worth of freebies you might be in trouble under the Bribery Act and you almost certainly would have top pay Benefit in Kind tax. As he is already in the 45% bracket it means he ought to get a tax bill of £45k
Any accountants in that want to comment? Am I right?
I could quote you the relevant tax rules issued by HMRC but as a broad rule, if you are not an employee of the hospitality provider there is no BIK arising.
Why ale house accountants continue to post such rubbish is beyond me.
The provision of 10 Downing Street as accommodation is a BIK and if you google it you will find Sunaks broad tax details
Thanks for your clarification but no need to be a partisan pompous dick about it.
In my view BIK or capital gains or some sort of tax on this type of value, particularly when it relates to a gift that is given because someone is a minister of state, should apply. If I attempted to claim clothing through my business on the dubious claim I needed to "look smart for my work" I would pay BIK. Starmer's view (and perhaps yours) is clearly that all those in the public sector, including himself, should be given special treatment.
Anyhow, I think I'd rather be "an ale house account" than a real one!! In the words of John Cleese: "Well, er, yes Mr. Anchovy, but you see your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon."
In your view != what the law says.
Is this not a site where people give opinions? It might be a loophole that Starmer wriggles his hypocritical, but nontheless well dressed person through. If a business person would get hammered for BIK for trying to put his/her suits through the books, the same should apply to our politicians. Personally I couldn't give a shit about the football attendance (politicians go to these types of events), it is the greedy tasteless extravagance on clothjng and the double standard that is clearly being demonstrated.
law you don't like != loophole
Erm - the whole idea of being in a parliamentary democracy is that laws that are inequitable can and should be changed. Politicians believing that different rules apply to them then those of us that they apply laws to, is not a good look for said democracy.
People in this thread have been explaining to you that the same rules do apply to politicians, and that you’re erroneously convinced that the rules are something other than they are,
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
Bollox, only a test from Edinburgh would come out with that tosh pS. I am not from Glasgow so no bias
I’m going to refine my “London is the new Anchorage” meteorological meme. It’s hyperbolic, something I abhor. We don’t get the snows of Alaskan winters
I think we’ve now got the climate of somewhere about 500-1000km north of Vancouver. Somewhere like Haida Gwaii or Dawsons Landing or Whaletown
London: the Canadian Pacific sub-Arctic of the east
Not as catchy but closer to the truth. We now have a cold rainforest climate
This is just wrong, sorry. London has only 40% of the precipitation of Haida Gwell.
But we’re catching up, aren’t we?
*stares outside*
East coast of the UK is frankly rather pleasant. Even Edinburgh has less rain than Lisbon, Rome, Palermo, Geneva. It's the dark winters and cloudy skies that can cause issues, but then we get these glorious weeks in May and June.
Glasgow is grim though.
OTOH, 'cos of the rain, our island is gloriously verdant. Bill Bryson once said of Devon that you could be forgiven for thinking its chief industry was the manufacture of chlorophyll. And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
Beautifully put and so sadly untrue
I do genuinely enjoy arriving back to a dull grey mild day, and I wouldn't want it any less wet, because I do genuinely love the greenness of the UK and the west of it in particular. But I will quietly concede I wouldn't mind a bit more blue sky - just as much rain, but rather more concentrated. I'd also like a bit more snow in winter. Britain never looks better than when covered in snow.
I genuinely envy your ability to enjoy our weather
I sometimes wonder if my endless pro travel has spoiled me. ie I’ve been to so many lovely places with lovely climates it’s made me overly critical of British damp and grey, which isn’t THAT bad
But then I remember my first Mediterranean holiday aged about seven and how that warm consistent sun made me instantly happier, and how I felt - even aged seven - “my God, this is what weather is meant to be like, this is my kind of world” - so maybe I was born in the wrong climate and all my travels since have been at attempt to escape it
Quite a lot of people like our climate because they dislike heat. This is not a fashionable view, perhaps because it isn't possible to commercialise or advertise the concept of liking rather boring middling weather - outside temperature at say 16-21 C.
My Mum included, she's been here over 50 years, and, despite living the first 20-odd years of life in southern India, says her country of birth is too hot!
Comments
There are decent arguments for some tariffs, on some goods, for revenue purposes, or protection of domestic markets etc.
Trump's arguments are those of an ignorant child.
When Maurice Saatchi next has his brainstorming session in his Chateau on Cap Ferrat I'll make sure this is posted on his ENORMOUS gates.
I see what you did there Roger, you little tinker, you doubled up a devastatingly incisive political comment with a nudge-nudge that you actually don’t just know where Maurice Saatchi lives, (not far from you natch) but he has enormous gates.
Most people would drop in how well they know Maurice or let slip an anecdote about when they were at a party at his mansion on Cap Ferrat but you trump that by knowing he has big gates, even better than actually being invited past them.
❗ Conservative GAIN from Green
Tuesday's Thurston (Mid Suffolk) council by-election result:
CON: 49.2% (+18.9)
GRN: 44.0% (-10.6)
LAB: 6.7% (-0.2)
No LDem (-8.1) as prev.
+/- 2023
Estimated turnout: ~25% (-26)
https://x.com/BritainElects/status/1839379871379734619
1. It was in the wrong place - not enough by passers
2. It was too expensive and weird - Indian-Japanese fusion?!
3. It was the wrong size, too big to be a fun tiny pop, too small to be a grand event
This pained me because I met the owner as he proudly gazed at his nearly-finished restaurant, expensively kitted out. He was a nice guy
It has now shuttered. I never saw it full.
How much did that guy lose on that business? £50k? More?
He could have asked me and I’d have told him, for £5, “don’t open that restaurant there”
But, still, there wasn't a qualifier about whether the President was an Executive President in your original statement. I think my point that lots of Presidents are not directly elected by majority vote of a universal franchise is a valid one.
https://qeliz.inicioacademies.org.uk/yorkshire-expedition-has-students-preparing-for-once-in-a-lifetime-trip/
I don't think a set of 17 year olds doing A levels at a college have a clue on how to repair a local flooded road...
Incidentally, I still remember the occasion I first told my parents that I loved them. I'd told them many times before, of course, but this is the first time I went out of my way, as an adult, to say so. Not as part of an existing conversation, or as an addendum to saying goodnight, but as a deliberate, single act.
I had a schoolfriend who ended up going to the same uni as me. In fact, we ended up on differing floors of the same halls of residence tower block. One day I commented on some slight scars on his back, which I had seen many times before at school.
"Oh," he said. "That's where my dad beat me."
This led to a long conversation, in which he told me that his dad was a bit of a sh*t and that his homelife was complex. I'd sorta gathered much of this before, but it was the first time he told me the depths of the story.
After I left his room, I went to the hall's phone stalls, phones my mum and dad, and told them I loved them, and I thanked them for everything they'd done for me.
*stares outside*
"British chip factory involved in sensitive military projects has been nationalised by the Ministry of Defence following warnings that it was at risk of closure.
The Government confirmed on Friday that it had purchased the site in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, from US company Coherent."
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/one-of-britain-s-last-microchip-factories-rescued-in-20m-deal/ar-AA1rj1WK?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=6b9cdee27e684735a08a73b004f550fe&ei=10
Glasgow is grim though.
But the sadness here is that THIS restaurant was never going to work. It was bound to fail. So much was against it, and if the owner had only asked a couple of neighbours they could have told him
AFAIK that location has never been any kind of restaurant/hospitality business before. It’s always been something like estate agents. Maybe an opticians. Somewhere boring you go because you need to, not because you’re just passing by and think Ooh!
It was the wrong restaurant serving the wrong food in the wrong place and in the wrong premises
Isn't the tariff in that situation akin to charging VAT, in the sense that a transaction is taking place, and so that's an opportunity for the state to take a cut. Obviously all such taxes introduce friction into the economy, and so have their downside, but if you're going to levy any tax at all it's generally better to tax lots of things a little, than a few things a lot.
Can a modest level of taxation of international trade be defended on the basis of widening the tax base?
I used to imagine we had a climate like Vancouver. We don’t. Vancouver gets way more sun
In some respects the bad weather is an attraction. These enormous uniform banks of cloud sweeping in from the Atlantic - you've just got to make it to the ferry terminal between them!
This is YORKSHIRE; why is that not genetic?
It's the volatility that we should be worried about rather than the gradual change. Not really set up for droughts and monsoons.
London is sui generis again.
And there is a moment when, after a week in Southern Europe when you've gradually become accustomed to the pale washed-out beige and the brightness, that your plane descends through the clouds above Kinder on its descent into Manchester Airport, and you're peering keenly out the window looking for familiar landmarks because your family know how much you love doing that and they always indulge this one, one time where your wants take precedence over those of your children who are in any case plugged into electronic devices and they let you have the window seat, and suddenly there is Tameside; sweet, unremarkable, uninteresting Tameside below you, startlingly close, and the force of the GREEN hits you almost bodily - and the urban form suddenly makes sense again, and everything is familiar, and there's the M60, that must be Bredbury, and look, there's the Pyramid, there's Edgeley Park, there's John Lewis at Cheadle (see? they're not interested; the window seat would have been wasted on them anyway), there's the Heald Green line and we're inches over Moss Nook and the world is green and subtle and British right to the horizon, and man, it's good to be home and as the tears slightly well with the hiraeth that you didn't know you had been feeling but has now been gloriously blown away, that you reflect - actually, there's a lot to be said for grey, damp and mild.
BBC News - Lorry driver who ran over sleeping woman jailed
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ced02qpe1j8o
My instinct here is that such a long sentence is disproportionate (particularly given much worse driving is often let off - see Emma Newman in Glasgow) , but again the driving ban is too short.
Given the web page calls it a Yorkshire Expedition, I wouldn't send my kids there to study geography!
*per the address on the web page
Historically, it was the largest source of revenue for the United States, at the start of its existence as independent country. But the debate over the essential purpose of tariffs hasn't really changed - rather it's the appreciation of the economic benefits of free trade which came to dominate.
https://www.taxnotes.com/tax-history-project/tax-history-why-tax-people-should-care-about-tariffs/2024/06/14/7kcdj
...these goals have never been exclusive of one another, although they can often work at cross-purposes. A single law can serve several ends, as Congress made clear in 1789 when it emphasized the need for both revenue and restriction. Tariffs, the lawmakers wrote in the first tariff law’s preamble, were “necessary for the support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection of manufactures.”
While Irwin’s three objectives can coexist, one or another tends to dominate for long stretches. Accordingly, Irwin has periodized the history of American trade policy into three long eras, each dominated by a single objective.
During the first era, stretching from 1789 to the beginning of the Civil War, tariffs were designed to raise revenue, as the young nation cast about for ways to pay its bills. In the second era, lasting from 1861 to 1933, policymakers focused on restriction, using tariffs to shield domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. And in the third era, beginning in 1934 under President Franklin Roosevelt, policymakers sought to encourage reciprocity, negotiating bilateral and multilateral agreements to lower trade barriers around the globe.
Irwin’s periodization is more than just impressionistic; by measuring the average tariff on dutiable goods (tariff revenue divided by the value of total dutiable imports), he identified the three eras by charting their relative emphasis on protectionism. “The average tariff on dutiable imports can be interpreted, somewhat simplistically but still usefully, as the average degree of protection given to domestic producers facing foreign competition,” he explained.
“In the revenue period, from 1790 to 1860, average tariffs rose from about 20 percent to 60 percent and then fell back down to 20 percent,” Irwin wrote. “In the restriction period, from 1861 to 1933, the average tariff on dutiable imports jumped to 50 percent and remained at about that level for several decades. In the reciprocity period, from 1934 to the present, the average tariff fell sharply and then leveled off at about 5 percent.”..
LAB: 30% (+1)
CON: 26% (+1)
RFM: 18% (=)
LDM: 13% (-1)
GRN: 8% (=)
Via
@Moreincommon_
, 24-25 Sep.
Changes w/ 10-11 Sep.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1839617229442158704
LabCon surge.
SPLORG 44%
And broken, sleazy Lib Dems on the slide.
Bella Bella, further north on that BC coast, looks even closer. Notably greyer than Vancouver. Generally rainy and cool with nagging winds, but the occasional burst of really hot summer weather - AKA the New British Climate
Rayner seems to be the ideal working class person for the upper and middle class to use to show they are not class prejudiced. I cannot hate the working class. I like Ange.
Of course working class people who rioted, many of whom were not motivated by race, but deprivation, poverty or wanting a ruck with Plod are looked down on as are the areas they come from. Good piece in the Guardian on this today.
"Angela Rayner makes a lot of being working class. In fact when those grisly images came back from Ibiza this summer of Ange in a rave, she said it was because she was working class, and the working classes like to party. No, Ange; we’re conflating two things here. There are your personal proclivities and there are the attributes of the working class and they’re not the same. In fact, the Deputy PM is getting away with murder on the back of her self-description as working class. It’s a way of seeing off criticism of her personal judgment as class-based snobbiness."
Absolutely the above, and I care nothing for her dancing badly in Ibiza.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/opinion-angela-rayner-stop-playing-the-working-class-card/ar-AA1rbLO1?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=43c9aae1777b424f9d3b4b0fe885777c&ei=9
I see what you did there Roger, you little tinker, you doubled up a devastatingly incisive political comment with a nudge-nudge that you actually don’t just know where Maurice Saatchi lives, (not far from you natch) but he has enormous gates.
Most people would drop in how well they know Maurice or let slip an anecdote about when they were at a party at his mansion on Cap Ferrat but you trump that by knowing he has big gates, even better than actually being invited past them.
I don't know Maurice Saatchi though I have worked for his various agencies. No, the reason is more prosaic.
I was using a French location finder in the area once and she showed me her book of locations. She came to one and said 'You'll know the owner of this house. It's Maurice Saatchi'.
'Why would someone like Maurice Saatchi rent his house out for film shoots? I asked He's extremely rich and he knows what a film crew can do' She said 'All my clients are extremely rich and however much money they have it's never enough. That's how they stay rich'!
So when I was thinking of the absurd story of Covent Garden Gate. I remembered that Saatchi was Chairman of the Tory Party and well known for his brain storming sessions. He probably gave a ton of money to the Tory Party as well and he was enobled. In fact as I thought about it I was going to reply to Jessop and tell him he had a point!
Given that most of these are French, it is entirely possible that the whole EU tax system is distorted to protect the interests of about 43 people growing 0.00000000000000002% of the coffee drunk in Europe.
If you include French possessions like French Guyana they DEFFO grow coffee
Most people would drop in how well they know Maurice or let slip an anecdote about when they were at a party at his mansion on Cap Ferrat but you trump that by knowing he has big gates, even better than actually being invited past them.
I don't know Maurice Saatchi though I have worked for his various agencies. No, the reason is more prosaic.
I was using a French location finder in the area once and she showed me her book of locations. She came to one and said 'You'll know the owner of this house. It's Maurice Saatchi'.
'Why would someone like Maurice Saatchi rent his house out for film shoots? I asked He's extremely rich and he knows what a film crew can do' She said 'All my clients are extremely rich and however much money they have it's never enough. That's how they stay rich'!
So when I was thinking of the absurd story of Covent Garden Gate. I remembered that Saatchi was Chairman of the Tory Party and well known for his brain storming sessions. He probably gave a ton of money to the Tory Party as well and he was enobled. In fact as I thought about it I was going to reply to Jessop and tell him he had a point!
I was just being annoying but nice reply.
I'd also like a bit more snow in winter. Britain never looks better than when covered in snow.
I sometimes wonder if my endless pro travel has spoiled me. ie I’ve been to so many lovely places with lovely climates it’s made me overly critical of British damp and grey, which isn’t THAT bad
But then I remember my first Mediterranean holiday aged about seven and how that warm consistent sun made me instantly happier, and how I felt - even aged seven - “my God, this is what weather is meant to be like, this is my kind of world” - so maybe I was born in the wrong climate and all my travels since have been at attempt to escape it
Basically, they sent it back to the judge, saying there must be a hearing to determine those acts which were part of Trump's actions in his capacity as President - and those which were not. Normally the evidence would be limited to 40 pages. Here though, the judge has said that there must be a full review of ALL the evidence - to comply with the Supreme Court's requirements. So nearer to 200 pages of the allegations of what Trump did around January 6th have been deposited with the court. These will then be reviewed and as far as required, be redacted before being released as court papers.
And visible to all.
So we are going to have a wealth of detail of what Trump did or did not do. Much of this will be testimony not previously in the public domain. Trump's lawyers have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent this release. But they keep coming upon the same - ironic - brick wall: will of the Supreme Court.
Certain sections of the media are going to run and run and run and run with this.
January 6th is one area where rather flaky Republicans and especially Indepenednets are not inclined to give Trump a pass. If it look like his actions support the proposition he did all he could to ensure the success of the January 6th insurrectionsists, it will make it very difficult for him to claim they are "hostages". He could consequently lose a few points going in to the final weeks or even days of the campaign. Those are a few points he can't afford to lose.
We still have (at least one) coal mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberpergwm
Under the principles of EU development law etc, one would expect certain countries to be exempt to encourage investment there.
For the best coffee, roasting has to be local. Though checking an Aldi bag'o'beans from my coffee cupboard I see the use by date is June 2026.
Green coffee imports to EU, then roast here, are nearly all of it:
Europe has a huge roasting industry. Therefore, most imported coffee is green coffee. In 2023, Europe imported 3 million tonnes of green coffee (caffeinated and decaffeinated combined). This is a huge amount, compared to the 10.7 thousand tonnes of roasted coffee.
https://www.cbi.eu/market-information/coffee/roasted-coffee/market-potential
I think part of that is about brand. Labour's brand really isn't very local governmenty. It's all about national level politics and metro-mayors. Whereas often Tory councillors are well known local businesspeople or farmers. I think they'll make good progress at the next locals, much more so (outside a very narrow range of seats) than Reform.
If I were classifying the GB-wide parties based on national vs local focus I'd go:
Lab: 80:20 N:L
Con: 65:35
Ref: 90:10 (though may change as they develop a regional base)
LD: 35:65
Green: 20:80
If you want to see something Nostradamus-like, watch this BBC programme from 1979 about the effect of computers on society, especially the last few minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo5QF_Rz4TM
"The Mighty Micro Episode 4 The Introverted Society"
Meanwhile, NATO member Hungary has said that they would not have resisted a Russian invasion of their country, and Ukraine shouldn't have done so either.
Today does not feel like a good day for the collective defence of democracies against authoritarians.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1839614553014817087?t=WZGymwvBphsdXPSXQYBu4w&s=19
The idea that a green and pleasant land exposed to the whims of the North Atlantic should have the climate of the south of France is, er, somewhat niche.
I think in the long run this is the sort of thing this government will be judged on. They are promising two sets of things: serious, accountable government; and providing (imo sensible) long term solutions to thorny problems.
Based on experiences of the last generation of governments I believe this one is over promising and will underdeliver. If they prove me wrong then I think they deserve to be in power for a generation.
If they fail I think we'll just slide further into the cheap political wins of populist politics such as that of Reform and the Greens (SLORG if you will).
When Maurice Saatchi next has his brainstorming session in his Chateau on Cap Ferrat I'll make sure this is posted on his gate.
Down among the tax dodgers and rogues
The one to watch for Reform might be the new Linconshire mayorality. (How can counties have Mayors? They should be called Sheriffs, or if you want proper romanticism, Counts.)
pS. I am not from Glasgow so no bias