It looks like the leadership could well be decided on Wednesday. If Cleverly goes through he probably gets to the membership with Tugendhat and Badenoch preferences and on the Conhome survey might then beat Jenrick.
If however Tugendhat gets most Stride preferences and some lent votes from Jenrick to knock out Cleverly then Jenrick is favourite again. As Jenrick almost certainly beats Tugendhat with members it would need most of Cleverly's votes to go to Badenoch to stop him
Badenoch still has a good chance of winning the contest in my opinion.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
Of course each side is saying the same thing. Before the Dems dialled it down a touch following the attempted assassination of Trump, they were calling this the last election, and that Trump was a danger to the Republic and democracy in general.
Of course neither Trump or Harris are the end of American democracy. If the Republic of Gilead ever came into being, it wouldn’t be by a Trumpian coup, but with rainbow lanyards, a dozen pronouns and lots of ‘Joy’.
You've clearly not read or watched The Handmaid's Tale.
I have read both the original book, it’s recent sequel and the tv show, though it got a bit silly after the second season.
As an aside, the Northern Echo also has details of the "gifts" received by North East Mayor Kim McGuinness since her election in May.
A cake was delivered without prior notice addressed to the mayor. Donor: Capital & Centric LTD. Value: £50. Date: May 6 2024. Private dinner with other UK Mayors. Donor: Aviva Investors. Value: £50. Date: 20 May 2024. Private dinner. Donor: Hitachi. Value: £50. Date: June 5 2024. Chamber of Commerce Business Awards. Donor: Chamber Business Awards. Value: £100. Date: June 27 2024. BBC Proms concert in Gateshead and reception. Donor: BBC Proms Concert – The Glasshouse. Value: £50. Date: July 26 2024. Edinburgh Tattoo Ceremony and evening meal. Donor: Edinburgh Tattoo. Value: £300. Date: August 19 2024 “If U Care Share” shirt. Donor: If U Care Share. Value: £50. Date: August 30 2024. Great North Run Dinner. Donor: Great North Run Company. Value: £150. Date: September 7 2024. Accommodation at Hilton Hotel, Gateshead, before Great North Run. Donor: Great North Run Company. Value: £200. Date: September 7 2024. Private dinner at Labour Party Conference. Donor: Nissan. Value: £50. Date: September 24 2024.
For balance, she also declined a number of gifts:
An invitation from Channel 4 to a Paralympic Games Garden Party in Paris. Football tickets offered by Sunderland AFC, Newcastle United shirt sponsor Sela, and Newcastle Airport, as well as hospitality packages at an England rugby match at Twickenham and England’s one-day cricket international against Australia at Chester-le-Street.
In the current spirit of neo-puritanism when it comes to political leaders receiving any kind of freebie, do we not need to apply some form of context (apart from the routine Labour bashing)?
If this is going to the North East Mayor, what is going to other Council leaders such as the Mayor of Newham or the Leader of Surrey County Council? The value of the accepted gifts is just over £1000 - you may say that's £1000 too much but even if you take the cake and send it to a residential home (for example), you've still accepted the cake.
That sounds reasonable.
She’s going to major events in her constituency, as one might expect of the Mayor, and is turning down high-value events in London and Paris as well as football hospitality which we’ve seen elsewhere to be a well-organised lobbying effort.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
Neither do I - but you're looking at this as though it's some kind of binary event. A Trump presidency could do enormous damage while falling short of "ending democracy".
Has Orban ended democracy in Hungary ? Probably not yet, but that's certainly the direction of travel.
As I pointed out back in 2016, these things can be like supertankers or jetskis. You can have a coup that suddenly changes political direction, like a jetski; but these are obvious and can have massive blowback. Or you can have planned incremental changes that slowly change democracy's direction. These can be less obvious, except with hindsight.
In the US, we have seen the latter. Trump's picks for the Supreme Court have had most effect in the four years after Trump lost power, rather than before. I expect the rate to increase, but the same basic idea: make it so the GOP and GOPian values remain in power, even if the electorate throw them out.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
We've already seen that "separation of powers" depends on good-faith behaviours and breaks down under even relatively slight pressure.
I think it is probably the Federal/State structure that saves US democracy in the event of Trump2. We've already seen the greater independence of State Governors (e.g. in the recent hurricane disaster response) and I don't think they'll wear it.
You forget too the key stakeholder, the US people. Trump isn’t winning half the vote because half the country love him. Most on both sides will be voting this year with nose pegs firmly on.
In 2016, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
In 2020, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever.
God knows what 2028 looks like, perhaps Americans will eventually come to their senses and choose a couple of candidates approaching normal?
So you think Biden was worse than Clinton and Harris is worse than Biden?
Pretty much, and I also think that 2024 Trump is a lot worse than 2016 Trump.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
Neither do I - but you're looking at this as though it's some kind of binary event. A Trump presidency could do enormous damage while falling short of "ending democracy".
Has Orban ended democracy in Hungary ? Probably not yet, but that's certainly the direction of travel.
As I pointed out back in 2016, these things can be like supertankers or jetskis. You can have a coup that suddenly changes political direction, like a jetski; but these are obvious and can have massive blowback. Or you can have planned incremental changes that slowly change democracy's direction. These can be less obvious, except with hindsight.
In the US, we have seen the latter. Trump's picks for the Supreme Court have had most effect in the four years after Trump lost power, rather than before. I expect the rate to increase, but the same basic idea: make it so the GOP and GOPian values remain in power, even if the electorate throw them out.
To extend your analogy, US democracy is like a fleet, and at the moment, the overall direction of the fleet is being set by the GOP supertanker, which is, itself, being directed by the grifters and Project2025 gangsters on their jetskis.
If I understand this, SKS new chief of staff is Morgan McSweeney who masterminded SKS election campaign, the ‘ming vase’ campaign, with a hope he can bring this success into government. Can someone explain how a campaign that was about running around saying as little as possible about as much as possible, not upsetting anyone or doing anything just to maintain a poll lead would transfer into a successful strategy for governance?
This pre-budget speculation is getting silly. The Mail and Telegraph in particular have spent weeks saying Reeves will tax everything from the family goldfish upwards, followed by stories like this one, saying Reeves cannot tax goldfish because of Treasury analysis, and all without any substantive evidence that Reeves ever intended anything of the sort.
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
Mr. JohnL, the speculation is Labour's own fault. In the election they only ruled out what taxes they would increase, now they've decided investment's for cutting, public sector pay is for increasing, and tax rises are necessary but they won't give even vague hints and have left months for people to speculate.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
Starmer certainly is ruthless but I'm not sure Sue Gray was the problem, and therefore getting rid of her would solve the problem. The problem basically is one of communication, the government explaining what it's up to and aligning policy to that agenda. Gray seemed strong on the wheels of government bit, which was surely her real job.
Starmer really needs Mandelson to explain how to manage media communications - because even I could do a better job than this current Government at media comms...
It’s a more difficult job now than it was back in 1997, mostly thanks to the entire Lobby spending 16 hours a day on Twitter, but Starmer absolutely needs to find both someone who can set the daily agenda from within government, and someone who can be “Minister for the Today Programme” - even if they’re otherwise scumbags like Blair had with Campbell and Mandleson.
Get Blair and Mandelson back in to run things.
Are we sure he hasn't? Has Starmer at least read an early draft of Blair's new book. Performatively fighting his own party with the Change motif, and more recently the WFA cut, surely smacks of Blair/Mandelson.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
We've already seen that "separation of powers" depends on good-faith behaviours and breaks down under even relatively slight pressure.
I think it is probably the Federal/State structure that saves US democracy in the event of Trump2. We've already seen the greater independence of State Governors (e.g. in the recent hurricane disaster response) and I don't think they'll wear it.
You forget too the key stakeholder, the US people. Trump isn’t winning half the vote because half the country love him. Most on both sides will be voting this year with nose pegs firmly on.
In 2016, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
In 2020, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever.
God knows what 2028 looks like, perhaps Americans will eventually come to their senses and choose a couple of candidates approaching normal?
"Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever. "
Only in the mind of a Trumpian madman. Harris is not a bad candidate, especially in the manner in which she got the candidature.
Have you seen her talk? The inability to think on her feet and give real answers rather than just parroting a line about being middle class? Or the nonsensical talk about the the past and the future being different?
The lack of real policy detail is scary.
America should have had a female president by now. I have long believed that Hillary should have got the job rather than Obama. She was a far more credible and less tainted figure at that point. Obama would have been well placed to take over and would have been a better president for being more politically experienced.
Harris is not a good candidate. She is not a good politician. The inability to avoid talking using meaningless word soup is worrying. The policy vacuum is unacceptable. The track record is not strong.
There must be good women in the ranks of the Democrats. Women who can articulate a positive vision for the future with a clear policy agenda.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
Starmer certainly is ruthless but I'm not sure Sue Gray was the problem, and therefore getting rid of her would solve the problem. The problem basically is one of communication, the government explaining what it's up to and aligning policy to that agenda. Gray seemed strong on the wheels of government bit, which was surely her real job.
Starmer really needs Mandelson to explain how to manage media communications - because even I could do a better job than this current Government at media comms...
It’s a more difficult job now than it was back in 1997, mostly thanks to the entire Lobby spending 16 hours a day on Twitter, but Starmer absolutely needs to find both someone who can set the daily agenda from within government, and someone who can be “Minister for the Today Programme” - even if they’re otherwise scumbags like Blair had with Campbell and Mandleson.
Get Blair and Mandelson back in to run things.
Are we sure he hasn't? Has Starmer at least read an early draft of Blair's new book. Performatively fighting his own party with the Change motif, and more recently the WFA cut, surely smacks of Blair/Mandelson.
Bad Al and John McTernan are all over the media this morning that he is messing it up, that the Government was “delivering drift” rather than change.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
Neither do I - but you're looking at this as though it's some kind of binary event. A Trump presidency could do enormous damage while falling short of "ending democracy".
Has Orban ended democracy in Hungary ? Probably not yet, but that's certainly the direction of travel.
As I pointed out back in 2016, these things can be like supertankers or jetskis. You can have a coup that suddenly changes political direction, like a jetski; but these are obvious and can have massive blowback. Or you can have planned incremental changes that slowly change democracy's direction. These can be less obvious, except with hindsight.
In the US, we have seen the latter. Trump's picks for the Supreme Court have had most effect in the four years after Trump lost power, rather than before. I expect the rate to increase, but the same basic idea: make it so the GOP and GOPian values remain in power, even if the electorate throw them out.
There's a danger of both - and the more of the latter would be inevitable.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
Starmer certainly is ruthless but I'm not sure Sue Gray was the problem, and therefore getting rid of her would solve the problem. The problem basically is one of communication, the government explaining what it's up to and aligning implementation of policy to that agenda. Gray seemed strong on the wheels of government bit, which was surely her real job.
Reminds me a bit of the issues with Chelsea or Man Utd...particularly Potter, came with reputation knew what they were doing, the changing room decided otherwise from the get go and made it clear on the pitch they were going to cause trouble. Man Utd are similar, they keep getting rid of managers, but there is clearly a culture problem.
Here are a couple of clips (one and two minutes) of Rio Ferdinand, one of England's and Manchester United's best ever defenders, describing the problems of David Moyes taking over from Sir Alex Ferguson. The Prime Minister could do worse than listen.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
We've already seen that "separation of powers" depends on good-faith behaviours and breaks down under even relatively slight pressure.
I think it is probably the Federal/State structure that saves US democracy in the event of Trump2. We've already seen the greater independence of State Governors (e.g. in the recent hurricane disaster response) and I don't think they'll wear it.
You forget too the key stakeholder, the US people. Trump isn’t winning half the vote because half the country love him. Most on both sides will be voting this year with nose pegs firmly on.
In 2016, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
In 2020, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever.
God knows what 2028 looks like, perhaps Americans will eventually come to their senses and choose a couple of candidates approaching normal?
"Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever. "
Only in the mind of a Trumpian madman. Harris is not a bad candidate, especially in the manner in which she got the candidature.
Have you seen her talk? The inability to think on her feet and give real answers rather than just parroting a line about being middle class? Or the nonsensical talk about the the past and the future being different?
The lack of real policy detail is scary.
America should have had a female president by now. I have long believed that Hillary should have got the job rather than Obama. She was a far more credible and less tainted figure at that point. Obama would have been well placed to take over and would have been a better president for being more politically experienced.
Harris is not a good candidate. She is not a good politician. The inability to avoid talking using meaningless word soup is worrying. The policy vacuum is unacceptable. The track record is not strong.
There must be good women in the ranks of the Democrats. Women who can articulate a positive vision for the future with a clear policy agenda.
They just need to put in the effort to find them.
That's pretty well what conservatives say about every Democratic woman candidate.
Carbon copy of what was said about Hillary when she was running.
Harris is probably not the strongest candidate they've ever fielded, but neither is she particularly weak. The idea she's as bad as Trump is just bollocks.
The psychodrama around Sue Gray is as nothing to the one that will engulf the Tories unless the new leader kills the monster lurking in the wings...
not if Boris Johnson can help it. It’s clear that his memoir, Unleashed, out this week, is primarily intended not as a historical account but as deliberate myth-making. His motivation for picking up his pen is often assumed to be Churchill’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Johnson’s interest is far more immediate. It’s whether he can lever a misleading version of his past into an eventual comeback.
There were two stunning moments on air that revealed just how power-hungry Johnson is. Bradby asked who he preferred as US president, Harris or Trump? Johnson replied pompously that “the job of a UK premier is to be on the best possible terms with both”. An astonished Bradby said: “But you’re not the premier!” Johnson’s face fell and he lapsed into incoherent mumbling: “Yeah, yeah, I know, but…”
The second was when Bradby asked who he’d prefer as Tory leader. Johnson, who’d been watching with narrowed eyes and wolfish grin, momentarily lost control. His face contorted, his cheeks ballooned and he blew a raspberry. He could not disguise his contempt. His verbal recovery was quick — “four good candidates…” — but nobody could fail to grasp how Johnson will view the next leader. In his imagination he’s still the rightful prime minister. They’ll be a rival to destroy.
If Trump wins in November there must be a strong chance Boris returns as Tory leader and tries to emulate his US counterpart and fellow icon of the populist right.
Johnson would also be more likely to squeeze the Farage and Reform vote and take back Labour seats in the redwall than any of the 4 Tory leadership candidates. He would fail to regain Tory votes lost to the LDs and much of the blue wall but so would most of the 4 except Tugendhat.
Jenrick has already said he would welcome Boris back in the parliamentary party and there are enough Boris loyalists left who would give up their seat in a by election for him even on the thinner Tory benches. Cleverly was also loyal to Boris to the end, even after Javid and Sunak had resigned.
Loyal to Boris? I mean why? I can see that, for purely careerist reasons, some might have wanted to suck up to him when he wielded power, but now he's just a disgraced old has-been who's not even an MP. Why would anyone give the twerp even the time of day?
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
Of course each side is saying the same thing. Before the Dems dialled it down a touch following the attempted assassination of Trump, they were calling this the last election, and that Trump was a danger to the Republic and democracy in general.
Of course neither Trump or Harris are the end of American democracy. If the Republic of Gilead ever came into being, it wouldn’t be by a Trumpian coup, but with rainbow lanyards, a dozen pronouns and lots of ‘Joy’.
You've clearly not read or watched The Handmaid's Tale.
I have read both the original book, it’s recent sequel and the tv show, though it got a bit silly after the second season.
I can't do that. If I've read the book I have no interest in knowing how someone else interprets the characters.
And talking of which if you listen to R4 Today at 07:45:00 (or indeed the whole interview which begins earlier) with an English professor currently teaching in the US it will give you a smile that will last all day.
This pre-budget speculation is getting silly. The Mail and Telegraph in particular have spent weeks saying Reeves will tax everything from the family goldfish upwards, followed by stories like this one, saying Reeves cannot tax goldfish because of Treasury analysis, and all without any substantive evidence that Reeves ever intended anything of the sort.
Its over three months since the general election.
Compare with:
2010 General election 06/05 Budget 22/06
1997 General election 01/05 Budget 02/07
1979 General election 03/05 Budget 12/06
Speculation fills an information vacuum.
Its not helped by having a new government which looks generally uncertain.
This pre-budget speculation is getting silly. The Mail and Telegraph in particular have spent weeks saying Reeves will tax everything from the family goldfish upwards, followed by stories like this one, saying Reeves cannot tax goldfish because of Treasury analysis, and all without any substantive evidence that Reeves ever intended anything of the sort.
Some of these are classic flag post issues, suggest it and see what happens. The policy vacuum is entirely a consequence of the government’s timing. You start listing the things you won’t increase and then people look for the things you have kept quiet on, or the influential people in government circles who have suggested other things. If the Cons had done their job properly pre-election they would have notice WFP was missing from the manifesto despite being in all the previous ones. I’m pretty sure if they had cottoned on the response would have been “of course we have no intention to get rid of winter fuel payments, we have no intention to tax goldfish either, but we haven’t put that in the manifesto”.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
Starmer certainly is ruthless but I'm not sure Sue Gray was the problem, and therefore getting rid of her would solve the problem. The problem basically is one of communication, the government explaining what it's up to and aligning implementation of policy to that agenda. Gray seemed strong on the wheels of government bit, which was surely her real job.
Reminds me a bit of the issues with Chelsea or Man Utd...particularly Potter, came with reputation knew what they were doing, the changing room decided otherwise from the get go and made it clear on the pitch they were going to cause trouble. Man Utd are similar, they keep getting rid of managers, but there is clearly a culture problem.
Here are a couple of clips (one and two minutes) of Rio Ferdinand, one of England's and Manchester United's best ever defenders, describing the problems of David Moyes taking over from Sir Alex Ferguson. The Prime Minister could do worse than listen.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
We've already seen that "separation of powers" depends on good-faith behaviours and breaks down under even relatively slight pressure.
I think it is probably the Federal/State structure that saves US democracy in the event of Trump2. We've already seen the greater independence of State Governors (e.g. in the recent hurricane disaster response) and I don't think they'll wear it.
You forget too the key stakeholder, the US people. Trump isn’t winning half the vote because half the country love him. Most on both sides will be voting this year with nose pegs firmly on.
In 2016, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
In 2020, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever.
God knows what 2028 looks like, perhaps Americans will eventually come to their senses and choose a couple of candidates approaching normal?
"Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever. "
Only in the mind of a Trumpian madman. Harris is not a bad candidate, especially in the manner in which she got the candidature.
Have you seen her talk? The inability to think on her feet and give real answers rather than just parroting a line about being middle class? Or the nonsensical talk about the the past and the future being different?
The lack of real policy detail is scary.
America should have had a female president by now. I have long believed that Hillary should have got the job rather than Obama. She was a far more credible and less tainted figure at that point. Obama would have been well placed to take over and would have been a better president for being more politically experienced.
Harris is not a good candidate. She is not a good politician. The inability to avoid talking using meaningless word soup is worrying. The policy vacuum is unacceptable. The track record is not strong.
There must be good women in the ranks of the Democrats. Women who can articulate a positive vision for the future with a clear policy agenda.
They just need to put in the effort to find them.
Five minutes of research gives at least a handful of options, all aged 40-60.
Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan. Katie Hobbs, Governor of Arizona Maura Healey, Governor of Massachusetts Tammy Duckworth, US Senate, Illinois Kirsten Gillibrand, US Senate, New York
Pretty sure I’ve heard them all speak well.
I agree with you on Harris, she’s a total vacuum whose only real task for the past three years has been to sort out the Southern border, at which she’s failed miserably.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
Of course each side is saying the same thing. Before the Dems dialled it down a touch following the attempted assassination of Trump, they were calling this the last election, and that Trump was a danger to the Republic and democracy in general.
Of course neither Trump or Harris are the end of American democracy. If the Republic of Gilead ever came into being, it wouldn’t be by a Trumpian coup, but with rainbow lanyards, a dozen pronouns and lots of ‘Joy’.
You've clearly not read or watched The Handmaid's Tale.
I have read both the original book, it’s recent sequel and the tv show, though it got a bit silly after the second season.
I can't do that. If I've read the book I have no interest in knowing how someone else interprets the characters.
And talking of which if you listen to R4 Today at 07:45:00 (or indeed the whole interview which begins earlier) with an English professor currently teaching in the US it will give you a smile that will last all day.
As an aside, the Northern Echo also has details of the "gifts" received by North East Mayor Kim McGuinness since her election in May.
A cake was delivered without prior notice addressed to the mayor. Donor: Capital & Centric LTD. Value: £50. Date: May 6 2024. Private dinner with other UK Mayors. Donor: Aviva Investors. Value: £50. Date: 20 May 2024. Private dinner. Donor: Hitachi. Value: £50. Date: June 5 2024. Chamber of Commerce Business Awards. Donor: Chamber Business Awards. Value: £100. Date: June 27 2024. BBC Proms concert in Gateshead and reception. Donor: BBC Proms Concert – The Glasshouse. Value: £50. Date: July 26 2024. Edinburgh Tattoo Ceremony and evening meal. Donor: Edinburgh Tattoo. Value: £300. Date: August 19 2024 “If U Care Share” shirt. Donor: If U Care Share. Value: £50. Date: August 30 2024. Great North Run Dinner. Donor: Great North Run Company. Value: £150. Date: September 7 2024. Accommodation at Hilton Hotel, Gateshead, before Great North Run. Donor: Great North Run Company. Value: £200. Date: September 7 2024. Private dinner at Labour Party Conference. Donor: Nissan. Value: £50. Date: September 24 2024.
For balance, she also declined a number of gifts:
An invitation from Channel 4 to a Paralympic Games Garden Party in Paris. Football tickets offered by Sunderland AFC, Newcastle United shirt sponsor Sela, and Newcastle Airport, as well as hospitality packages at an England rugby match at Twickenham and England’s one-day cricket international against Australia at Chester-le-Street.
In the current spirit of neo-puritanism when it comes to political leaders receiving any kind of freebie, do we not need to apply some form of context (apart from the routine Labour bashing)?
If this is going to the North East Mayor, what is going to other Council leaders such as the Mayor of Newham or the Leader of Surrey County Council? The value of the accepted gifts is just over £1000 - you may say that's £1000 too much but even if you take the cake and send it to a residential home (for example), you've still accepted the cake.
That sounds reasonable.
She’s going to major events in her constituency, as one might expect of the Mayor, and is turning down high-value events in London and Paris as well as football hospitality which we’ve seen elsewhere to be a well-organised lobbying effort.
It sounds reasonable but, as Wendy Chamberlain demonstrated on last week's BBC Question Time, even constituency-based donations can cause problems. As the MP for Fife North East (or whatever it's called these days), she represents St Andrews. As such, she was invited to the Open. I have no problem with it yet she was called out for it. Equally, she sits on the Links Trust which manages the courses in St Andrews. It is basic common sense that the local MP should be involved in local charities, events, trusts, etc.
I'm not being critical of Chamberlain nor McGuinness. It's this notion that you have fellow MPs and journalists trawling expense claims and the Register of Interests looking at everything just to hold the MP (or public official) to account.
On the same edition of Question Time, Ian Murray was criticised for accepting a football ticket from the Scottish Salmon Association (I think) whilst at the Labour Conference in Liverpool. The questions put to him were "Why did he do it?" and "Why did they go to Liverpool to lobby him?" Haven't organisations and lobby groups always gone to conferences? Any it makes perfect sense to try to lobby somebody or something whilst everybody is all in one place; how many other Scottish Labour MPs (and MSPs for that matter) were also there? It's efficient.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Saudi will pump oil to flatten any rises.
Russia is rather hoping for oil price spikes to pay for its Ukraine adventure. The GDP is still looking quite healthy because the economy is on a war footing. But its foreign currency reserves are in a parlous state. There is a persuasive argument that whether it wins or loses the war, the Russian economy is screwed when that war footing ends.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Yep. I can't think that it all kicking off in Iran with major air strikes, possibly supported by US, is going to help Harris.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Saudi will pump oil to flatten any rises.
Russia is rather hoping for oil price spikes to pay for its Ukraine adventure. The GDP is still looking quite healthy because the economy is on a war footing. But its foreign currency reserves are in a parlous state. There is a persuasive argument that whether it wins or loses the war, the Russian economy is screwed when that war footing ends.
iirc have been holding down their supply to try and force the price higher. They need $100 a barrel I seem to recall reading the other day to make enough for all their plans.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Last day for voter registration in Arizona and Georgia today.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Yep. I can't think that it all kicking off in Iran with major air strikes, possibly supported by US, is going to help Harris.
I suspect Harris will keep out of it and oppose any US strikes.
The launch of Melania's book tomorrow with her fervently pro choice remarks in it is not going to help Trump drive up evangelical turnout at all either
This pre-budget speculation is getting silly. The Mail and Telegraph in particular have spent weeks saying Reeves will tax everything from the family goldfish upwards, followed by stories like this one, saying Reeves cannot tax goldfish because of Treasury analysis, and all without any substantive evidence that Reeves ever intended anything of the sort.
Its over three months since the general election.
Compare with:
2010 General election 06/05 Budget 22/06
1997 General election 01/05 Budget 02/07
1979 General election 03/05 Budget 12/06
Speculation fills an information vacuum.
Its not helped by having a new government which looks generally uncertain.
It's a consequence of having the GE just before a long-planned and traditional recess. Wouldn't surprise me if it eventually transpired that Sunak, or his inner circle, expected this to happen and acted accordingly.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Saudi will pump oil to flatten any rises.
Russia is rather hoping for oil price spikes to pay for its Ukraine adventure. The GDP is still looking quite healthy because the economy is on a war footing. But its foreign currency reserves are in a parlous state. There is a persuasive argument that whether it wins or loses the war, the Russian economy is screwed when that war footing ends.
It does appear that Blinken finally got MBS to answer his calls in recent weeks, as the US strategic reserve is almost empty and they’re a month away from the election.
Possibly the best thing that could happen to the world economy in the next few months, would be a return to the 2020-era willy-waving oil-pumping contest between MBS and Putin. Putin would be properly screwed this time because no-one is paying close to market price for his oil, the only buyers being India and China at large discounts.
The psychodrama around Sue Gray is as nothing to the one that will engulf the Tories unless the new leader kills the monster lurking in the wings...
not if Boris Johnson can help it. It’s clear that his memoir, Unleashed, out this week, is primarily intended not as a historical account but as deliberate myth-making. His motivation for picking up his pen is often assumed to be Churchill’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Johnson’s interest is far more immediate. It’s whether he can lever a misleading version of his past into an eventual comeback.
There were two stunning moments on air that revealed just how power-hungry Johnson is. Bradby asked who he preferred as US president, Harris or Trump? Johnson replied pompously that “the job of a UK premier is to be on the best possible terms with both”. An astonished Bradby said: “But you’re not the premier!” Johnson’s face fell and he lapsed into incoherent mumbling: “Yeah, yeah, I know, but…”
The second was when Bradby asked who he’d prefer as Tory leader. Johnson, who’d been watching with narrowed eyes and wolfish grin, momentarily lost control. His face contorted, his cheeks ballooned and he blew a raspberry. He could not disguise his contempt. His verbal recovery was quick — “four good candidates…” — but nobody could fail to grasp how Johnson will view the next leader. In his imagination he’s still the rightful prime minister. They’ll be a rival to destroy.
If Trump wins in November there must be a strong chance Boris returns as Tory leader and tries to emulate his US counterpart and fellow icon of the populist right.
Johnson would also be more likely to squeeze the Farage and Reform vote and take back Labour seats in the redwall than any of the 4 Tory leadership candidates. He would fail to regain Tory votes lost to the LDs and much of the blue wall but so would most of the 4 except Tugendhat.
Jenrick has already said he would welcome Boris back in the parliamentary party and there are enough Boris loyalists left who would give up their seat in a by election for him even on the thinner Tory benches. Cleverly was also loyal to Boris to the end, even after Javid and Sunak had resigned.
Loyal to Boris? I mean why? I can see that, for purely careerist reasons, some might have wanted to suck up to him when he wielded power, but now he's just a disgraced old has-been who's not even an MP. Why would anyone give the twerp even the time of day?
Boris remains the Prince over the Water for most Tory members and much of the parliamentary party and if Trump wins again I would make it at least evens Boris is Leader of the Conservative party again by the next general election
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Saudi will pump oil to flatten any rises.
Russia is rather hoping for oil price spikes to pay for its Ukraine adventure. The GDP is still looking quite healthy because the economy is on a war footing. But its foreign currency reserves are in a parlous state. There is a persuasive argument that whether it wins or loses the war, the Russian economy is screwed when that war footing ends.
Indeed. Anyone looking through the short term noise was seeing a wall of price suppressing supply hitting the market in Q4, even before the Saudis announced their intention to spool up from Dec. One wonders whether we should be linking the Saudi announcement with Zelenskys recent visit to Washington.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Yep. I can't think that it all kicking off in Iran with major air strikes, possibly supported by US, is going to help Harris.
The worrying thing about all this is that the Trump argument is unfortunately compelling to a lot of anxious and concerned voters: “I don’t want a war, I want to get everyone to stop, I will do deals and make it stop”.
Now of course the counter argument to that is that Trump could make a future war more likely if he is seen to be uninterested in NATO and sympathetic to Putin, but the average US voter probably just sees the world burning right now and wants someone to stop it. I don’t take great relish in that being a fact, but I can see how it could play well.
Trump means the end of US democracy; the end of aid to Ukraine; and the start of a very bad time for the world.
Shame on those who support him and spread his shit.
There’s a one in two chance you’re going to wake on 6 Nov with Trump as incoming president and there’s nothing you or anyone here can do about it. So best think past the hyperbole and think through if there’s a credible counter to your doom fears.
Trump has already been president. It was not the end of US democracy, with the institutions of the US constitution remaining intact. It is tricky to see constitutionally how Trump would seek a third term in both meanings of the word (legally, and his physical fitness)...
A second Trump administration is extremely unlikely to follow the pattern of the first. It's not for nothing that Trump has replaced almost the entirety of his White House team from last time round - and that almost every former cabinet member has said they won't vote for him.
Last time round he barely even expect to win; there was no plan. He is now surrounded by people on board with his more extreme ideas - and with plans to implement them.
There is ultimately the safeguard of separation of powers. Doesn’t mean it would be pretty but I don’t think the US is done as a democracy yet.
We've already seen that "separation of powers" depends on good-faith behaviours and breaks down under even relatively slight pressure.
I think it is probably the Federal/State structure that saves US democracy in the event of Trump2. We've already seen the greater independence of State Governors (e.g. in the recent hurricane disaster response) and I don't think they'll wear it.
You forget too the key stakeholder, the US people. Trump isn’t winning half the vote because half the country love him. Most on both sides will be voting this year with nose pegs firmly on.
In 2016, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
In 2020, we all thought we’d seen the worst two candidates ever.
Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever.
God knows what 2028 looks like, perhaps Americans will eventually come to their senses and choose a couple of candidates approaching normal?
"Now, in 2024, we again have the worst two candidates ever. "
Only in the mind of a Trumpian madman. Harris is not a bad candidate, especially in the manner in which she got the candidature.
Have you seen her talk? The inability to think on her feet and give real answers rather than just parroting a line about being middle class? Or the nonsensical talk about the the past and the future being different?
The lack of real policy detail is scary.
America should have had a female president by now. I have long believed that Hillary should have got the job rather than Obama. She was a far more credible and less tainted figure at that point. Obama would have been well placed to take over and would have been a better president for being more politically experienced.
Harris is not a good candidate. She is not a good politician. The inability to avoid talking using meaningless word soup is worrying. The policy vacuum is unacceptable. The track record is not strong.
There must be good women in the ranks of the Democrats. Women who can articulate a positive vision for the future with a clear policy agenda.
They just need to put in the effort to find them.
I don't think her speeches are as bad as you make out. Certainly, the MAGA nutcases have done a lot of cut-and-stitching of videos of her that magically appear on X. Nowadays, any misspeak is attenuated and broadcast immediately - on both sides.
But there's another point here: I'd say Obama was great at speaking and rhetoric, but was a middling-to-poor president. Biden was poor at speaking and rhetoric, but was a better president in terms of actions than Obama.
You generally have little idea how good someone will be at being a PM until they become PM; there is no job quite like it, and LOTO certainly is not. (*). The same is true of president, where the vice-president role is, IMO, pretty meaningless and often invisible in terms of decision-making and speeches.
In the case of Trump, we have a good idea on what his presidency will be like, as he had done it before. And given January 6th, there are no positive signs that he will be good for America or the world.
In the case of Harris, she could easily surprise on the upside.
(*) In the case of Johnson, his actions as MoL gave massive warning signs. But most PMs don't have that sort of experience.
Even if the message is true, the timing is appalling and it's obvious that they don't think the Palestinians have any responsibility for what's going on.
This week sees more states join in person early voting , notably Arizona on the 9th .
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
Saudi will pump oil to flatten any rises.
Russia is rather hoping for oil price spikes to pay for its Ukraine adventure. The GDP is still looking quite healthy because the economy is on a war footing. But its foreign currency reserves are in a parlous state. There is a persuasive argument that whether it wins or loses the war, the Russian economy is screwed when that war footing ends.
Yes. The great problem the Russian economy faces is there’s no great peace dividend coming to it, whatever happens. They can keep it going at the moment, but the long term prospects don’t look good.
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Even if the message is true, the timing is appalling and it's obvious that they don't think the Palestinians have any responsibility for what's going on.
You only have to look at some of their other tweets to know they don't care about that. They regular call Israel an Apartheid state and of conducting genocide.
You can be for a ceasefire, two state solution, you can call out the wrong doings of Israel, and its soldiers, without claiming the nonsense that Israel is an Apartheid state or that the real intention is genocide.
The psychodrama around Sue Gray is as nothing to the one that will engulf the Tories unless the new leader kills the monster lurking in the wings...
not if Boris Johnson can help it. It’s clear that his memoir, Unleashed, out this week, is primarily intended not as a historical account but as deliberate myth-making. His motivation for picking up his pen is often assumed to be Churchill’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Johnson’s interest is far more immediate. It’s whether he can lever a misleading version of his past into an eventual comeback.
There were two stunning moments on air that revealed just how power-hungry Johnson is. Bradby asked who he preferred as US president, Harris or Trump? Johnson replied pompously that “the job of a UK premier is to be on the best possible terms with both”. An astonished Bradby said: “But you’re not the premier!” Johnson’s face fell and he lapsed into incoherent mumbling: “Yeah, yeah, I know, but…”
The second was when Bradby asked who he’d prefer as Tory leader. Johnson, who’d been watching with narrowed eyes and wolfish grin, momentarily lost control. His face contorted, his cheeks ballooned and he blew a raspberry. He could not disguise his contempt. His verbal recovery was quick — “four good candidates…” — but nobody could fail to grasp how Johnson will view the next leader. In his imagination he’s still the rightful prime minister. They’ll be a rival to destroy.
If Trump wins in November there must be a strong chance Boris returns as Tory leader and tries to emulate his US counterpart and fellow icon of the populist right.
Johnson would also be more likely to squeeze the Farage and Reform vote and take back Labour seats in the redwall than any of the 4 Tory leadership candidates. He would fail to regain Tory votes lost to the LDs and much of the blue wall but so would most of the 4 except Tugendhat.
Jenrick has already said he would welcome Boris back in the parliamentary party and there are enough Boris loyalists left who would give up their seat in a by election for him even on the thinner Tory benches. Cleverly was also loyal to Boris to the end, even after Javid and Sunak had resigned.
Loyal to Boris? I mean why? I can see that, for purely careerist reasons, some might have wanted to suck up to him when he wielded power, but now he's just a disgraced old has-been who's not even an MP. Why would anyone give the twerp even the time of day?
Boris remains the Prince over the Water for most Tory members and much of the parliamentary party and if Trump wins again I would make it at least evens Boris is Leader of the Conservative party again by the next general election
If I have my history right the Prince over the Water stayed there.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
20 years of deployment isn't very much. Solar panels have been around since 1881 but they only really started to get economical for most purposes when Obama and Xi turned the subsidy dial up to 11 and people started learning really fast and getting massive economies of scale.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Labour are in danger of having a worse record on climate change and energy than the Conservatives (or at least, Con-LD coalition with Davey as the minister).
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
The psychodrama around Sue Gray is as nothing to the one that will engulf the Tories unless the new leader kills the monster lurking in the wings...
not if Boris Johnson can help it. It’s clear that his memoir, Unleashed, out this week, is primarily intended not as a historical account but as deliberate myth-making. His motivation for picking up his pen is often assumed to be Churchill’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Johnson’s interest is far more immediate. It’s whether he can lever a misleading version of his past into an eventual comeback.
There were two stunning moments on air that revealed just how power-hungry Johnson is. Bradby asked who he preferred as US president, Harris or Trump? Johnson replied pompously that “the job of a UK premier is to be on the best possible terms with both”. An astonished Bradby said: “But you’re not the premier!” Johnson’s face fell and he lapsed into incoherent mumbling: “Yeah, yeah, I know, but…”
The second was when Bradby asked who he’d prefer as Tory leader. Johnson, who’d been watching with narrowed eyes and wolfish grin, momentarily lost control. His face contorted, his cheeks ballooned and he blew a raspberry. He could not disguise his contempt. His verbal recovery was quick — “four good candidates…” — but nobody could fail to grasp how Johnson will view the next leader. In his imagination he’s still the rightful prime minister. They’ll be a rival to destroy.
If Trump wins in November there must be a strong chance Boris returns as Tory leader and tries to emulate his US counterpart and fellow icon of the populist right.
Johnson would also be more likely to squeeze the Farage and Reform vote and take back Labour seats in the redwall than any of the 4 Tory leadership candidates. He would fail to regain Tory votes lost to the LDs and much of the blue wall but so would most of the 4 except Tugendhat.
Jenrick has already said he would welcome Boris back in the parliamentary party and there are enough Boris loyalists left who would give up their seat in a by election for him even on the thinner Tory benches. Cleverly was also loyal to Boris to the end, even after Javid and Sunak had resigned.
Loyal to Boris? I mean why? I can see that, for purely careerist reasons, some might have wanted to suck up to him when he wielded power, but now he's just a disgraced old has-been who's not even an MP. Why would anyone give the twerp even the time of day?
Boris remains the Prince over the Water for most Tory members and much of the parliamentary party and if Trump wins again I would make it at least evens Boris is Leader of the Conservative party again by the next general election
If I have my history right the Prince over the Water stayed there.
He made his comeback with the Jacobite rebellion albeit defeated at Culloden but not before having got as far as Derby
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
There’s the 200 partnership between Masood and Shafique, done at nearly five an over, and we’re still half an hour from tea. This is going to be a long couple of days in the field for England.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Labour are in danger of having a worse record on climate change and energy than the Conservatives (or at least, Con-LD coalition with Davey as the minister).
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
... and they gave us the highest energy prices in the world, crucifying our manufacturing and standard of living generally.
When I hear Badenoch speak, I believe she wants to reform the NHS, cut the size of the state, protect & enhance the UK constitution, promote political liberalism & enhance Britain's role in the world. I just don't believe her Party would let her. And her rivals wouldn't even try.
The psychodrama around Sue Gray is as nothing to the one that will engulf the Tories unless the new leader kills the monster lurking in the wings...
not if Boris Johnson can help it. It’s clear that his memoir, Unleashed, out this week, is primarily intended not as a historical account but as deliberate myth-making. His motivation for picking up his pen is often assumed to be Churchill’s: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Johnson’s interest is far more immediate. It’s whether he can lever a misleading version of his past into an eventual comeback.
There were two stunning moments on air that revealed just how power-hungry Johnson is. Bradby asked who he preferred as US president, Harris or Trump? Johnson replied pompously that “the job of a UK premier is to be on the best possible terms with both”. An astonished Bradby said: “But you’re not the premier!” Johnson’s face fell and he lapsed into incoherent mumbling: “Yeah, yeah, I know, but…”
The second was when Bradby asked who he’d prefer as Tory leader. Johnson, who’d been watching with narrowed eyes and wolfish grin, momentarily lost control. His face contorted, his cheeks ballooned and he blew a raspberry. He could not disguise his contempt. His verbal recovery was quick — “four good candidates…” — but nobody could fail to grasp how Johnson will view the next leader. In his imagination he’s still the rightful prime minister. They’ll be a rival to destroy.
If Trump wins in November there must be a strong chance Boris returns as Tory leader and tries to emulate his US counterpart and fellow icon of the populist right.
Johnson would also be more likely to squeeze the Farage and Reform vote and take back Labour seats in the redwall than any of the 4 Tory leadership candidates. He would fail to regain Tory votes lost to the LDs and much of the blue wall but so would most of the 4 except Tugendhat.
Jenrick has already said he would welcome Boris back in the parliamentary party and there are enough Boris loyalists left who would give up their seat in a by election for him even on the thinner Tory benches. Cleverly was also loyal to Boris to the end, even after Javid and Sunak had resigned.
Loyal to Boris? I mean why? I can see that, for purely careerist reasons, some might have wanted to suck up to him when he wielded power, but now he's just a disgraced old has-been who's not even an MP. Why would anyone give the twerp even the time of day?
Boris remains the Prince over the Water for most Tory members and much of the parliamentary party and if Trump wins again I would make it at least evens Boris is Leader of the Conservative party again by the next general election
If I have my history right the Prince over the Water stayed there.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Labour are in danger of having a worse record on climate change and energy than the Conservatives (or at least, Con-LD coalition with Davey as the minister).
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
... and they gave us the highest energy prices in the world, crucifying our manufacturing and standard of living generally.
That's moronic stupidity, not brilliance.
Yes and no.
AIUI when gas prices spiked in 2023/4, we suffered because of our reliance on gas. But we also had a fair amount of renewables available, which reduced our need for gas supply. Not enough, but some.
I fear we would have faced much higher prices if we had not had renewables in the last five years, even given the odd way the 'market' operates.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Labour are in danger of having a worse record on climate change and energy than the Conservatives (or at least, Con-LD coalition with Davey as the minister).
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
... and they gave us the highest energy prices in the world, crucifying our manufacturing and standard of living generally.
That's moronic stupidity, not brilliance.
Because our marginal pricing model uses the wholesale price of the most expensive method of generating energy.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/10/06/sammy-basso-obituary-progeria-activism/ We generally don’t think of rare-disease advocacy as funny. But of the many qualities apparent to anyone who met Sammy Basso, a biologist and spokesperson for the progeria patient community, who died suddenly on Saturday at 28, perhaps the most disarming was his ability to find laughter in almost anything. One April Fool’s Day, he posted a video about his doctors putting him on a diet — an absurdity for someone whose genetic disorder prevented him from gaining weight. “A seafood diet. When I see food, I eat!” he said, pressing a button for a ba-dum-tss, grinning into the camera.
He knew the disease made him look unusual — bald, eyebrowless, prematurely aged, a bit like E.T. — and he loved to joke about it. He did it outside a friend’s house on Halloween, delighting in kids’ reactions as he handed out candy. He did it outside Area 51, the Nevada military base synonymous with UFOs and extraterrestrial life. “He put on some crazy sunglasses that looked like alien eyewear and sat on a park bench, causing numerous tourists to actually believe they’d discovered the real thing,” recalled Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health...
..The fact that the science of progeria has advanced so much is in part due to Basso himself. He volunteered for the clinical trial of what would become the first approved drug for the disease, which helps prevent the buildup of toxic protein, slowing the progression of symptoms and extending some patients’ lives.
Then, he joined the research group working toward a gene-edited therapy. Rather than snipping out the genetic typo with molecular scissors, this team hopes to swap out that letter in the sequence of DNA for the correct one, in a sort of biological word processing. The researchers met on Mondays at 4 p.m. Eastern. It was late in Italy, but Basso was always sharp. He was the person who set the agenda for the meeting and took the often technical, jargon-heavy minutes. “He helped us every time we met to keep our eyes on what we were trying to do, which was not just an academic exercise,” said Collins. On top of being an inspiration and an invaluable patient voice, he was a scientist in his own right, with a master’s degree in molecular biology. As Collins put it, “He was a full member of the team.”..
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart. Europe used to be innovative and drove new technologies. Why is Europe so badly lagging behind the US now? What happened?
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
The higher rate tax band starts at £50,271. Someone who earns £55,000 paying 5% of their salary = £2,750 gross pension contribution which is, therefore, all eligible for 40% tax relief. If this relief reduce to 20% the relief would fall from £1,100 to £550. Therefore a £550 reduction in relief not £1,100.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Labour are in danger of having a worse record on climate change and energy than the Conservatives (or at least, Con-LD coalition with Davey as the minister).
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
... and they gave us the highest energy prices in the world, crucifying our manufacturing and standard of living generally.
That's moronic stupidity, not brilliance.
Yes and no.
AIUI when gas prices spiked in 2023/4, we suffered because of our reliance on gas. But we also had a fair amount of renewables available, which reduced our need for gas supply. Not enough, but some.
I fear we would have faced much higher prices if we had not had renewables in the last five years, even given the odd way the 'market' operates.
CfD serve to protect consumers from volatile wholesale prices, so that's a direct way in which renewables helped to mitigate the Ukraine crisis.
Otherwise, firms with nuclear/renewable generation selling on the wholesale market did extremely well out the spike in prices, until we introduced the new levy in response. A weird disincentive tbh.
One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart. Europe used to be innovative and drove new technologies. Why is Europe so badly lagging behind the US now? What happened?
I'm fearful. Sir Keir seems to be relying on the budget to save him. But such is the media narrative that it will probably get a terrible reception whatever Rachel does. And we've already had one relaunch today; we can't have another one. I think Sir Keir might have blown it.
Even if the message is true, the timing is appalling and it's obvious that they don't think the Palestinians have any responsibility for what's going on.
It was put out on the 6th of October. What sort of date range should be off limits around an anniversary, a week before and after, the whole month?
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
We were talking about nepotism in politics yesterday...one that passed me by and a fav of PB....
New MP Hamish Falconer, who was immediately promoted to Foreign Office Minister and happens to be the son of New Labour heavyweight Lord Falconer
Aside from anything else, these government appointments for the well-connected few (well, quite a few as it turns out) is politically unwise at it will cause resentment firstly amongst time-served backbenchers, and also newcomers who have substantial expertise and high-level experience outside parliament.
I'm fearful. Sir Keir seems to be relying on the budget to save him. But such is the media narrative that it will probably get a terrible reception whatever Rachel does. And we've already had one relaunch today; we can't have another one. I think Sir Keir might have blown it.
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
I think its certainly true, as we saw with support for ISIS, that there is a problem particularly with 2nd / 3rd generation Muslims supporting extremist groups.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Depends what standard of living you want.
True - but it's creating an incentive to avoid being in the £50-60,000 income band when that previous reason (child benefit taper) has been only recently been raised to £60,000.
One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart. Europe used to be innovative and drove new technologies. Why is Europe so badly lagging behind the US now? What happened?
Network effects, availability of venture capital, American protectionism vs Britain's come and get it, British entrepreneurs cashing out at the first sniff from inevitably American buyers, lack of government investment.
One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart. Europe used to be innovative and drove new technologies. Why is Europe so badly lagging behind the US now? What happened?
Network effects, availability of venture capital, American protectionism vs our come and get it, British entrepreneurs cashing out at the first sniff from inevitably American buyers, lack of government investment.
This is Europe wide, so excessive regulation is also a huge problem.
The UK problem is the best and the brightest don't want to start start-ups (and universities aren't very good at supporting them in the UK). I don't have the link to hand, but a Y-Combinator guy had stats about this and the numbers coming out our of top unis that expressed desire and actually did it was tiny in comparison to US (in % terms).
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Depends what standard of living you want.
True - but it's creating an incentive to avoid being in the £50-60,000 income band when that previous reason (child benefit taper) has been only recently been raised to £60,000.
Agreed. It needs a root and branch review of tax bands and reliefs to remove these kinds of disincentives, combined with the removal of the higher rate relief on pension payments. All it requires is simple modelling and the political courage to face the blowback from top income earners.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Depends what standard of living you want.
True - but it's creating an incentive to avoid being in the £50-60,000 income band when that previous reason (child benefit taper) has been only recently been raised to £60,000.
Agreed. It needs a root and branch review of tax bands and reliefs to remove these kinds of disincentives, combined with the removal of the higher rate relief on pension payments. All it requires is simple modelling and the political courage to face the blowback from top income earners.
I don't think the blow back will be as bad as feared if the government sorted out cliff edges at £50-60k and £100-120k...they really piss people off and cause all sorts of problems. Try being a company owner that then ask if people want to work more / take on more responsibility for a pay rise, no, they want more vacation, 4 days a week, etc etc etc, anything but take the more money to work more as going into those brackets is just shooting yourself in the foot (particularly if you have kids).
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Does the Treasury really have no modelling for how people in the real world react to these cliff edges?
Also at £50k is the child benefit withdrawal, which adds even more to the 40% income tax rate application.
Millions of people don’t want to paid in the £50k-60k range, nor in the £100k-120k range, and people can and do reduce their hours to avoid.
I remember the first time I bumped into the 40% rate - I had a company car and there was loads of overtime available, which was great as I was saving a deposit. 60-70 hours a week, awesome when you’re 24 or 25. It hits you like a brick that you’re suddenly volunteering to work Sundays for what’s barely minimum wage take home, and so the work/life balance was adjusted accordingly.
The local landlord was very happy, my savings account and my employer less so.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Depends what standard of living you want.
True - but it's creating an incentive to avoid being in the £50-60,000 income band when that previous reason (child benefit taper) has been only recently been raised to £60,000.
Agreed. It needs a root and branch review of tax bands and reliefs to remove these kinds of disincentives, combined with the removal of the higher rate relief on pension payments. All it requires is simple modelling and the political courage to face the blowback from top income earners.
I don't think the blow back will be as bad as feared if the government sorted out cliff edges at £50-60k and £100-120k...they really piss people off and cause all sorts of problems.
Totally agree! That should be included in the root and branch review. It's low hanging fruit and would be widely welcomed.
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
I don't think one has to be Muslim or a student or a dedicated Corbynite to be saddened, at the least, by many if Israel's actions over the past few years. The treatment of the Palestinians on the West Bank has been dreadful; they have had little real opportunity to try and make something of their 'state'. What Hamas did a year ago was beyond dreadful but to my mind at least that does not excuse the obliteration of Gaza and the wholesale slaughter of the population. It reminds me of the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazi's in 1944.
And getting rid of all of those unhappy with her would have been difficult too – firstly, there were quite a few of them, and secondly finding them would not have been easy, as they had been making their feelings known discreetly.
I am told - by sources that have been consistently reliable through all of this - that a decision was made on Friday and the prime minister was willing to sack Sue Gray. He had decided, whatever she said, that she could no longer be his chief of staff.
Sounds like when you hear at a football club it been said that the manager has lost the dressing room.
Looks like quite a ruthless re-organisation of the office staff, and a very necessary one.
When it isn't working, it needs to change.
It’s sacking the office manager and keeping the staff.
Which suggests the change agenda is in trouble.
Given all the briefing to media over the summer, there’s clearly been one hell of a fight going on behind the scenes as to who’s actually in charge of running the show.
For the PM to lose his CoS only three months into being in government, does not reflect well on him.
The appearance is that he’s got no plan at all, and the (domestic political) news is dominated by a whole load of troughing and tittle-tattle while we wait for the doom and gloom of the Budget. Where’s their daily News Grid, and an appropriate minister sent out to sell the Story of the Day?
Even in the dying days of the last government, they could rely on the likes of Michael Gove to be up at 6am and spend the morning defending the indefensible.
Last week's daily News Grid was dominated by their spending £22 billion on carbon capture.
The same sum as the black hole they supposedly inherited from the Tories.
When that story was then first up on the Jeremy Vine show, with people phoning in to proclaim it utter bollocks, you have no news operation.
Complete madness, of course the detail is payments over many years if certain contractual conditions are met. But the surface of using the same figure as you mention, with the infamous black hole. What did they think people would do?
The most annoying thing about it is that, for once, we actually have a government 1) making an investment and 2) making that investment in the north. That should be unequalified good news.
But they've messed it up - indeed, a cynic might assume that no progress on CCS will be made and those £22 billion payments will instead be found plugging potholes in Islington, like usual.
It's a shame it's not something decent like offshore renewables hubs in Teesside and Aberdeen, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or tidal lagoons for power storage. Or 2/3rd of HS2 to Manchester. Or 22,000 miles of high-quality cycle lane.
If the carbon capture money was eventually used to fill some potholes in Islington it would be a better use of money than the current waste of money.
I simply don't see what carbon capture is supposed to solve beyond adding additional costs...
The money should be going on SMR or similar. But we are so late into that game that Rolls Royce have binned the UK factories for the none secret bits and those factories seem to be going to Eastern Europe who are now paying for the first few reactors...
IIUC what carbon capture is supposed to achieve is that if you're trying to get to net zero, you need to either replace everything that currently emits CO2, find a way to either stop putting some of it into the atmosphere, or actively remove some of it.
The problem is that some activities like cement or glass production emit CO2 even if you run them 100% on renewable energy. Then there are other things like aviation where the cost of not using fossil fuels looks like it'll be really high.
So if you're serious about doing net zero, and you're not going for radical degrowth or something like that, you need carbon capture.
However the other problem is that the current tech to do it doesn't work very well. With solar and wind and battery tech governments threw a lot of subsidies at people building them for a while then they ultimately made them really good and we could scale them up really big. Hopefully this will also happen with carbon capture, but we don't know. So the dilemma is that you can spend the money on solar and wind (or stuff like insulation) and in the short term it'll definitely be more effective than spending it on carbon capture, but then you're leaving part of the problem of getting to net zero totally unsolved.
My take is that places that the places on the planet with the most relevant expertise should be building this stuff. If it works then the rest of the world can use it and it'll have a big impact. I don't know whether Britain is one of those places or not.
That ignores the economic aspect. Spending the money on wind/solar/tidal etc would be of direct and obvious benefit, both from lower energy prices, and our balance of payments.
Carbon capture, as per this plan, both makes energy more expensive, and is of dubious benefit in climate change terms.
My point is that at this point carbon capture schemes are more like R&D than an actual deployment, so it's not obvious how you count the benefit. If you got the designs working and it turned out you could attach similar things to Chinese and Indian cement production then you potentially have an impact bigger than all of UK emissions put together.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
This isn't new technology; it's expensive old technology.
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper). This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
Yep it's an appalling bad idea that Rishi had actually managed to kick into the long grass..
Labour are in danger of having a worse record on climate change and energy than the Conservatives (or at least, Con-LD coalition with Davey as the minister).
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
... and they gave us the highest energy prices in the world, crucifying our manufacturing and standard of living generally.
That's moronic stupidity, not brilliance.
Plus, our nuclear energy is 4 - 6 times more expensive than South Korea.
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
I don't think one has to be Muslim or a student or a dedicated Corbynite to be saddened, at the least, by many if Israel's actions over the past few years. The treatment of the Palestinians on the West Bank has been dreadful; they have had little real opportunity to try and make something of their 'state'. What Hamas did a year ago was beyond dreadful but to my mind at least that does not excuse the obliteration of Gaza and the wholesale slaughter of the population. It reminds me of the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazi's in 1944.
You can think all of that and still not support Hamas, like the 9% of young people polled who now have a favourable view of Hamas
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Does the Treasury really have no modelling for how people in the real world react to these cliff edges?
Also at £50k is the child benefit withdrawal, which adds even more to the 40% income tax rate application.
Millions of people don’t want to paid in the £50k-60k range, nor in the £100k-120k range, and people can and do reduce their hours to avoid.
I remember the first time I bumped into the 40% rate - I had a company car and there was loads of overtime available, which was great as I was saving a deposit. 60-70 hours a week, awesome when you’re 24 or 25. It hits you like a brick that you’re suddenly volunteering to work Sundays for what’s barely minimum wage take home, and so the work/life balance was adjusted accordingly.
The local landlord was very happy, my savings account and my employer less so.
Child allowance is now tapered from £60,000 but it's just shuntered the issue to a slightly different group of people.
In my case I could now easily live on £50,000 a year - mortgage is paid off, the car is paid off and still decent - so it's simply going to result in me keeping money in the company / salary sacrificing as much as I can.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Does the Treasury really have no modelling for how people in the real world react to these cliff edges?
Also at £50k is the child benefit withdrawal, which adds even more to the 40% income tax rate application.
Millions of people don’t want to paid in the £50k-60k range, nor in the £100k-120k range, and people can and do reduce their hours to avoid.
I remember the first time I bumped into the 40% rate - I had a company car and there was loads of overtime available, which was great as I was saving a deposit. 60-70 hours a week, awesome when you’re 24 or 25. It hits you like a brick that you’re suddenly volunteering to work Sundays for what’s barely minimum wage take home, and so the work/life balance was adjusted accordingly.
The local landlord was very happy, my savings account and my employer less so.
I wonder if the Treasury does have the skills in modelling and psychology. Reeves should ensure that it does.
One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart. Europe used to be innovative and drove new technologies. Why is Europe so badly lagging behind the US now? What happened?
Network effects, availability of venture capital, American protectionism vs our come and get it, British entrepreneurs cashing out at the first sniff from inevitably American buyers, lack of government investment.
This is Europe wide, so excessive regulation is also a huge problem.
The UK problem is the best and the brightest don't want to start start-ups (and universities aren't very good at supporting them in the UK). I don't have the link to hand, but a Y-Combinator guy had stats about this and the numbers coming out our of top unis that expressed desire and actually did it was tiny in comparison to US (in % terms).
I remember that one too, a big difference in attitudes between top graduates in UK and US.
The top British STEM graduates want to go into Law, Consulting, Banking, Big Tech etc.
The top American STEM graduates want to start a company themselves.
Mr. JohnL, in brief: it's short-termism, a chronic problem in British politics.
Not quite. It is Britain not understanding how markets really work. From Thatcher onwards, we have signed up to an idealised Adam Smith free market as might be taught, for instance, in the introductory modules of Oxford's PPE course. In the real world, our rivals play hardball, witness America's combination of massive subsidies and protectionism. We see investment as a cost to be cut, and protectionism as unsporting and un-British. This is alongside the other difficulties already mentioned.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Depends what standard of living you want.
True - but it's creating an incentive to avoid being in the £50-60,000 income band when that previous reason (child benefit taper) has been only recently been raised to £60,000.
Agreed. It needs a root and branch review of tax bands and reliefs to remove these kinds of disincentives, combined with the removal of the higher rate relief on pension payments. All it requires is simple modelling and the political courage to face the blowback from top income earners.
Problem with pensions is that you also have employer contributions - anyone sane will be maximising those and taxing that is going to be hard work....
Almost one in ten – 9% – of 18-24 year olds have a favourable view of Hamas, compared to 3% of the general British public. More than two thirds (68%) of the British public has an unfavourable view of Hamas, as do 50% of young Britons.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
I have a feeling a lot of those "very left wing" people aren't Muslims. I think it is worrying that you can be against Israel's ongoing actions, but to be an unbeliever in what was probably the mostly widely filmed massacre is very concerning. We aren't relying on 3rd hand accounts of how bad it was, the footage is endless and new examples are constantly being released, but as we saw Owen Jones has tried on the yeah, but no, but yeah spreading doubt approach even after he was shown the horrific film that the Israelis put out.
The majority of under 30s who back Hamas will be British Muslims, the remainder Corbynite students mainly who have an ideological opposition to Israel
I don't think one has to be Muslim or a student or a dedicated Corbynite to be saddened, at the least, by many if Israel's actions over the past few years. The treatment of the Palestinians on the West Bank has been dreadful; they have had little real opportunity to try and make something of their 'state'. What Hamas did a year ago was beyond dreadful but to my mind at least that does not excuse the obliteration of Gaza and the wholesale slaughter of the population. It reminds me of the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazi's in 1944.
Indeed. The search for a comprehensive settlement that does the best possible for good people on all sides not really being attempted yet. Until this is the aim (USA? EU? UN? Saudi? Turkey? China? Egypt? Jordan? - could they all agree on such an aim and start getting pressure going) then the atrocity of one sided despair continues on all sides.
Even if the message is true, the timing is appalling and it's obvious that they don't think the Palestinians have any responsibility for what's going on.
It was put out on the 6th of October. What sort of date range should be off limits around an anniversary, a week before and after, the whole month?
I'd say the day before an anniversary of the mass slaughter of Jews is too close. Do you think it's too close?
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Does the Treasury really have no modelling for how people in the real world react to these cliff edges?
Also at £50k is the child benefit withdrawal, which adds even more to the 40% income tax rate application.
Millions of people don’t want to paid in the £50k-60k range, nor in the £100k-120k range, and people can and do reduce their hours to avoid.
I remember the first time I bumped into the 40% rate - I had a company car and there was loads of overtime available, which was great as I was saving a deposit. 60-70 hours a week, awesome when you’re 24 or 25. It hits you like a brick that you’re suddenly volunteering to work Sundays for what’s barely minimum wage take home, and so the work/life balance was adjusted accordingly.
The local landlord was very happy, my savings account and my employer less so.
Yes. I am sure London is different, but in much of the UK the decent ordinariness of collective household ambition is not really appreciated. Add to that that 2 people working longish hours even on minimum wage can earn between them £40-£50K, a high proportion of it untaxed, which in much of the UK is still quite a lot of money.
I fully expected this change (though personally would be very happy if it didn’t go ahead).
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
The issue with reducing pension tax relief from 40% to 20% is that it will hit someone on eg £55K with a reduction of tax relief of about £1100 if they are paying 5% of their income into their pension. But the big money would come from those on much higher incomes than £55K paying much more than 5% into their pensions.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
All I'm seeing is even more reasons to keep you income below £50,000 by any means practical..
Depends what standard of living you want.
True - but it's creating an incentive to avoid being in the £50-60,000 income band when that previous reason (child benefit taper) has been only recently been raised to £60,000.
Agreed. It needs a root and branch review of tax bands and reliefs to remove these kinds of disincentives, combined with the removal of the higher rate relief on pension payments. All it requires is simple modelling and the political courage to face the blowback from top income earners.
Problem with pensions is that you also have employer contributions - anyone sane will be maximising those and taxing that is going to be hard work....
That mainly applies to small owner businesses. I'd leave them alone.
Comments
She’s going to major events in her constituency, as one might expect of the Mayor, and is turning down high-value events in London and Paris as well as football hospitality which we’ve seen elsewhere to be a well-organised lobbying effort.
In the US, we have seen the latter. Trump's picks for the Supreme Court have had most effect in the four years after Trump lost power, rather than before. I expect the rate to increase, but the same basic idea: make it so the GOP and GOPian values remain in power, even if the electorate throw them out.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13931197/Rachel-Reeves-planned-pension-tax-raid-amid-warnings-unfairly-impact-public-sector-workers.html
Can someone explain how a campaign that was about running around saying as little as possible about as much as possible, not upsetting anyone or doing anything just to maintain a poll lead would transfer into a successful strategy for governance?
If that’s off the table it’s starting to look interesting where all this extra money is coming from. Surely it can’t all be IHT and CGT?
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) do not believe that reports that Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis in the attacks on 7th October 2023 are broadly true, compared to 7% of the wider British public. Just over half (55%) of the British public think that those reports are broadly true, compared to 39% of 18-24 year olds.
An astounding 16% of young British adults believe that the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7th October 2023 were justified, compared to 7% of the wider British public. This figure rises to 28% among people identifying as “very left-wing”.
More than one eighth of British 18-24 year olds (13%) believe that the British Government is wrong to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, compared to 7% of the British public and an astonishing 31% among the “very left-wing”.
https://antisemitism.org/new-polling-shows-extent-of-sympathy-for-hamas-and-frightening-trends-of-radicalism-among-young-britons/
Mr. JohnL, the speculation is Labour's own fault. In the election they only ruled out what taxes they would increase, now they've decided investment's for cutting, public sector pay is for increasing, and tax rises are necessary but they won't give even vague hints and have left months for people to speculate.
The lack of real policy detail is scary.
America should have had a female president by now. I have long believed that Hillary should have got the job rather than Obama. She was a far more credible and less tainted figure at that point. Obama would have been well placed to take over and would have been a better president for being more politically experienced.
Harris is not a good candidate. She is not a good politician. The inability to avoid talking using meaningless word soup is worrying. The policy vacuum is unacceptable. The track record is not strong.
There must be good women in the ranks of the Democrats. Women who can articulate a positive vision for the future with a clear policy agenda.
They just need to put in the effort to find them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3OCZ5zqNJ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY_ahLOi3Uo
https://unherd.com/2024/10/who-killed-sue-gray/
Carbon copy of what was said about Hillary when she was running.
Harris is probably not the strongest candidate they've ever fielded, but neither is she particularly weak. The idea she's as bad as Trump is just bollocks.
For the first time on record, the Atlantic has 3 #hurricanes simultaneously after September
https://x.com/philklotzbach/status/1842988125708263810
And talking of which if you listen to R4 Today at 07:45:00 (or indeed the whole interview which begins earlier) with an English professor currently teaching in the US it will give you a smile that will last all day.
Compare with:
2010
General election 06/05
Budget 22/06
1997
General election 01/05
Budget 02/07
1979
General election 03/05
Budget 12/06
Speculation fills an information vacuum.
Its not helped by having a new government which looks generally uncertain.
Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan.
Katie Hobbs, Governor of Arizona
Maura Healey, Governor of Massachusetts
Tammy Duckworth, US Senate, Illinois
Kirsten Gillibrand, US Senate, New York
Pretty sure I’ve heard them all speak well.
I agree with you on Harris, she’s a total vacuum whose only real task for the past three years has been to sort out the Southern border, at which she’s failed miserably.
The main economic data out this week is the final pre-election inflation report due on Thursday . This should show a further fall helped by lower prices at the pump.
The big unknown is what happens to gas prices over the next month. Israel’s decision in terms of what targets are hit in Iran will have a huge bearing and the subsequent retaliation from Iran .
A jump in pump prices will be leapt on by Trump and with such a close race could make a difference .
Harris has narrowed Trumps lead on the economy but what happens in the Middle East hangs over the last month of the election campaign .
New MP Hamish Falconer, who was immediately promoted to Foreign Office Minister and happens to be the son of New Labour heavyweight Lord Falconer
I'm not being critical of Chamberlain nor McGuinness. It's this notion that you have fellow MPs and journalists trawling expense claims and the Register of Interests looking at everything just to hold the MP (or public official) to account.
On the same edition of Question Time, Ian Murray was criticised for accepting a football ticket from the Scottish Salmon Association (I think) whilst at the Labour Conference in Liverpool. The questions put to him were "Why did he do it?" and "Why did they go to Liverpool to lobby him?" Haven't organisations and lobby groups always gone to conferences? Any it makes perfect sense to try to lobby somebody or something whilst everybody is all in one place; how many other Scottish Labour MPs (and MSPs for that matter) were also there? It's efficient.
Russia is rather hoping for oil price spikes to pay for its Ukraine adventure. The GDP is still looking quite healthy because the economy is on a war footing. But its foreign currency reserves are in a parlous state. There is a persuasive argument that whether it wins or loses the war, the Russian economy is screwed when that war footing ends.
I haven't the foggiest how likely they are to be useful or how much will be learned from running them but my point is that you can't evaluate an experimental technology just by looking at the cost per kg of CO2 saved of the thing you're building. If you were doing that then you'd only ever buy mature technology and you'd never have created the experimental things, and we wouldn't have solar, wind or nuclear.
The launch of Melania's book tomorrow with her fervently pro choice remarks in it is not going to help Trump drive up evangelical turnout at all either
Possibly the best thing that could happen to the world economy in the next few months, would be a return to the 2020-era willy-waving oil-pumping contest between MBS and Putin. Putin would be properly screwed this time because no-one is paying close to market price for his oil, the only buyers being India and China at large discounts.
Now of course the counter argument to that is that Trump could make a future war more likely if he is seen to be uninterested in NATO and sympathetic to Putin, but the average US voter probably just sees the world burning right now and wants someone to stop it. I don’t take great relish in that being a fact, but I can see how it could play well.
But there's another point here: I'd say Obama was great at speaking and rhetoric, but was a middling-to-poor president. Biden was poor at speaking and rhetoric, but was a better president in terms of actions than Obama.
You generally have little idea how good someone will be at being a PM until they become PM; there is no job quite like it, and LOTO certainly is not. (*). The same is true of president, where the vice-president role is, IMO, pretty meaningless and often invisible in terms of decision-making and speeches.
In the case of Trump, we have a good idea on what his presidency will be like, as he had done it before. And given January 6th, there are no positive signs that he will be good for America or the world.
In the case of Harris, she could easily surprise on the upside.
(*) In the case of Johnson, his actions as MoL gave massive warning signs. But most PMs don't have that sort of experience.
https://x.com/AmnestyUK/status/1842830656939741641
Even if the message is true, the timing is appalling and it's obvious that they don't think the Palestinians have any responsibility for what's going on.
https://x.com/mishtal/status/1843169278180327622?t=-7B9JzJpG3UclO1W--iFiQ&s=08
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/articles/religionbyageandsexenglandandwales/census2021
From the government's own announcement:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-reignites-industrial-heartlands-10-days-out-from-the-international-investment-summit
..CCUS technology removes CO2 emissions before it reaches the atmosphere and stores it safely beneath the seabed – using tried and tested technology that has been deployed across the globe for over 20 years..
Also being funded is "blue hydrogen" - an enormously expensive boondoggle to produce hydrogen from natural gas, to produce one of the most expensive fuels known to man.
A Darpa like effort to fund startup projects for novel carbon capture technologies would do what you describe (and be far cheaper).
This is just a large subsidy to the petrochemical industry.
You can be for a ceasefire, two state solution, you can call out the wrong doings of Israel, and its soldiers, without claiming the nonsense that Israel is an Apartheid state or that the real intention is genocide.
Their record on coal > gas > wind was genuinely brilliant.
Reeves could finesse this by eg raising the higher rate band from £50K to £55K which would be basically self financing for those paying into pensions on incomes just above £50K. And/or increase the personal allowance a bit to achieve tax neutrality for middle income earners while still hitting the high income earners.
That's moronic stupidity, not brilliance.
@andrew_lilico
When I hear Badenoch speak, I believe she wants to reform the NHS, cut the size of the state, protect & enhance the UK constitution, promote political liberalism & enhance Britain's role in the world. I just don't believe her Party would let her. And her rivals wouldn't even try.
https://x.com/andrew_lilico/status/1843213538262970837
AIUI when gas prices spiked in 2023/4, we suffered because of our reliance on gas. But we also had a fair amount of renewables available, which reduced our need for gas supply. Not enough, but some.
I fear we would have faced much higher prices if we had not had renewables in the last five years, even given the odd way the 'market' operates.
Which is gas.
Remarkable guy.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/10/06/sammy-basso-obituary-progeria-activism/
We generally don’t think of rare-disease advocacy as funny. But of the many qualities apparent to anyone who met Sammy Basso, a biologist and spokesperson for the progeria patient community, who died suddenly on Saturday at 28, perhaps the most disarming was his ability to find laughter in almost anything. One April Fool’s Day, he posted a video about his doctors putting him on a diet — an absurdity for someone whose genetic disorder prevented him from gaining weight. “A seafood diet. When I see food, I eat!” he said, pressing a button for a ba-dum-tss, grinning into the camera.
He knew the disease made him look unusual — bald, eyebrowless, prematurely aged, a bit like E.T. — and he loved to joke about it. He did it outside a friend’s house on Halloween, delighting in kids’ reactions as he handed out candy. He did it outside Area 51, the Nevada military base synonymous with UFOs and extraterrestrial life. “He put on some crazy sunglasses that looked like alien eyewear and sat on a park bench, causing numerous tourists to actually believe they’d discovered the real thing,” recalled Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health...
..The fact that the science of progeria has advanced so much is in part due to Basso himself. He volunteered for the clinical trial of what would become the first approved drug for the disease, which helps prevent the buildup of toxic protein, slowing the progression of symptoms and extending some patients’ lives.
Then, he joined the research group working toward a gene-edited therapy. Rather than snipping out the genetic typo with molecular scissors, this team hopes to swap out that letter in the sequence of DNA for the correct one, in a sort of biological word processing. The researchers met on Mondays at 4 p.m. Eastern. It was late in Italy, but Basso was always sharp. He was the person who set the agenda for the meeting and took the often technical, jargon-heavy minutes. “He helped us every time we met to keep our eyes on what we were trying to do, which was not just an academic exercise,” said Collins. On top of being an inspiration and an invaluable patient voice, he was a scientist in his own right, with a master’s degree in molecular biology. As Collins put it, “He was a full member of the team.”..
https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1842802627521679624?t=lcUl9rE-VBdwmsuH81U6zQ&s=19
Good job tech isn't the now and the future.
Otherwise, firms with nuclear/renewable generation selling on the wholesale market did extremely well out the spike in prices, until we introduced the new levy in response. A weird disincentive tbh.
The UK problem is the best and the brightest don't want to start start-ups (and universities aren't very good at supporting them in the UK). I don't have the link to hand, but a Y-Combinator guy had stats about this and the numbers coming out our of top unis that expressed desire and actually did it was tiny in comparison to US (in % terms).
Also at £50k is the child benefit withdrawal, which adds even more to the 40% income tax rate application.
Millions of people don’t want to paid in the £50k-60k range, nor in the £100k-120k range, and people can and do reduce their hours to avoid.
I remember the first time I bumped into the 40% rate - I had a company car and there was loads of overtime available, which was great as I was saving a deposit. 60-70 hours a week, awesome when you’re 24 or 25. It hits you like a brick that you’re suddenly volunteering to work Sundays for what’s barely minimum wage take home, and so the work/life balance was adjusted accordingly.
The local landlord was very happy, my savings account and my employer less so.
What Hamas did a year ago was beyond dreadful but to my mind at least that does not excuse the obliteration of Gaza and the wholesale slaughter of the population. It reminds me of the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazi's in 1944.
Our energy policy needs a long, hard look.
In my case I could now easily live on £50,000 a year - mortgage is paid off, the car is paid off and still decent - so it's simply going to result in me keeping money in the company / salary sacrificing as much as I can.
The top British STEM graduates want to go into Law, Consulting, Banking, Big Tech etc.
The top American STEM graduates want to start a company themselves.
https://x.com/KemiBadenoch/status/1842831164706312280