The IFS are independent and will be very much on the TV at the Autumn Statement
And as far as your last sentence I thought we were doing the new politics and this is exactly why the public are disillusioned
It's not my sentence, I'm just quoting the tweet. But I think there is some merit in the view that the state of the economy in 2028/29 will be the important thing.
The relevant sentence in Labour's manifestion is:
"Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax, or VAT."
I am sure Labour will say they are not increasing the NI rate for working people; others will disagree.
I suppose all taxation is a tax on working people, directly or indirectly. It depends on how far you want to stretch the definition.
And technically they stated that they wouldn't increase National Insurance, rather than contributions, so if they net it off against a decrease in employee contributions then they maintain their commitment. Indeed, it might be part of a long term trend to abolish NICs on the payslip entirely. About 2/3rd of NICs are employer, so it's by far the biggest chunk.
A broader question is why do we tax employment at all in this way? Why not transfer it all to income tax, including pensions, investments...land, property, wealth? (thought experiment rather than an actual suggestion).
The very numerous ways in which we are taxed is so that absolute evasion is harder and, crucially, it is the time honoured way of plucking the goose with the minimum amount of hissing. If we raised a trillion pounds, all of it from income tax we would get a terrible shock.
In 2024-25 income tax will raise approx £302.7 billion. This represents only 26.6 per cent of all public sector receipts and is equivalent to around £10,400 per household. (OBR)
IMHO consumption is the place to go for tax raising, despite the VAT pledge. 5% VAT on all food would raise a lot of money, and annoy an awful lot of people. The other place to go is land/property - you can't hide it.
So there’s certainly scope to rise. Maybe we should compromise and cap it at the Dutch rate.
Top tip: if you want to improve your country's productivity, all you need to do is have really high levels of employers' social security. I mean, it will mean that the low skilled won't ever be in the workforce, but it's *really* good for your productivity statistics.
As we have full employment, indeed labour shortages, there is some scope for a tax on jobs to encourage productivity. Particularly so if some of the funds raised go into training and rehab for those trying to get into work.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
That's just simple economic incentives though. The big tech platforms are largely built and generally speaking innovate from within. Even the start-up app sector has cooled significantly as if there's a good idea, it's probably being done by someone with much more money than you.
Now, social and online media desperately needs an endless stream of content to keep people on their platforms - so people now get hugely rewarded for something that requires less technical skill but is in high demand. Of course it makes sense to be a streamer.
As an aside too, no skill maybe threatened by AI more than coding. As we move to an increasingly AI world soft skills like those inherent in communications may become more valuable than certain hard ones. Companies pay 'influencers' vast sums for a reason. Soul destroying nonsense of course. But simple economics.
I've watched a few of her videos now - and her take on the AI (especially coding) stuff is dreadfully biased and... well, bad. Which taints the rest of the content on her channel for me as I think "Well, if it's this bad about things I know about - am I just being conned on the other hot takes?".
I guess a touch of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Why is it biased? What she says on that video is based on a couple of studies highlighted within, and seems reasonable. True, it's bearish, but it matches my limited experiences with using the tech for (play) coding.
She only covers studies that back up her thesis. So the study itself may or may not be biased, but cherry picking your choice of them is.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
Did you watch the video, I don't think you did.
We could do the same in any country, at any time in history. Ask enough people a question, and you will get people giving stoopid or funny answers. Particularly if you encourage them to gave an answer other than "Don't know."
Unless you are saying that those responses are the only ones that the interviewer got?
That is a typical clickbait video. They want the hits, so they edit the funniest answers, or even encourage people to give funny or wrong answer.
You described Gen Z as being 'pretty much morons' based on that video. I'd strongly argue that that makes you the moron, not them.
It's not based solely on that video. Gen Z are absolutely dumber than the generations that preceded them. We've just masked that by making exams easier so the grades look better. I showed my younger cousin who's at uni my old maths mock exams because I was clearing out my old room at my parents house and she could do about 5 or 6 questions, good enough for a fail she got the equivalent of an A at GCSE maths last summer. That's not me saying she's stupid, she isn't, it's just that the education system has stopped teaching kids anything and gen X parents seemingly don't give any fucks about education.
Ah, okay. You are using a clickbait video to back up your own implicit biases.
As for exam papers: syllabuses change, sometimes rapidly. Here's a question I don't know the answer to: assuming you are (say) 46, so you did GCSEs 30 years ago. Could you go back and do the GCSE equivalent paper from 1964 without preparation and get a good score?
Because I've been helping my son with his maths, I've been looking at recent GCSE papers. I got an A in maths at GCSE in 1989 (the second year they were held...). There's no way I'd get an A at a recent paper without preparation, because the areas of maths covered, the format of the questions, and other things have changed. And, to be fair, I'm more than a little rusty.
With preparation; sure, I should do well. But just showing a kid a paper they've not covered the syllabus of is a little unfair.
There's a fair view YouTube videos of university mathematicians trying to do historic and modern maths papers. They don't always get them right, or find them surprisingly hard.
I’ve been helping my son with his A Level revision and I did the same with his GCSEs. The maths was impossible, of course. But the thing that got me about the other subjects, including my degree subject Geography, was the absolutely brutal marking scheme.
One recent example. A question showing a leafy upmarket street in central London. It asks you to describe 3 possible challenges of living there. We both got one: expensive housing. But the other attempts were all fails: congestion? No evidence in the photo and it doesn’t count that we know it’s London and congested. Air pollution? Likewise, no visual evidence. Crime? Nope. I can’t even remember what the correct answers were but they were silly.
Others where you’re asked to describe a process, but if you describe it using not quite the approved terminology you get no marks (the weather and climate questions were awful on that).
So I would say from my experience that the exams are bloody difficult, but also stupid.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
I asked my Dad about the Sixties some years back.
He answered that it was a very depressing time and everyone was talking of emigrating. (So not much change then!).
When you look at the stats on how many Brits did emigrate in the Sixties, I think this may well be more accurate than most on the decade.
It's very anecdotal, but I grew up in the 60s and saw it as a time of opportunity and hope - I was a keen Communist, full of optimism about the world. Time wore the edges and the radicalism off - I didn't do anything very significant until 1997, when I was elected to Parliament as a fairly moderate Labour MP. But I've never condemned the idealism and I think we're too gloomy now.
So there’s certainly scope to rise. Maybe we should compromise and cap it at the Dutch rate.
Top tip: if you want to improve your country's productivity, all you need to do is have really high levels of employers' social security. I mean, it will mean that the low skilled won't ever be in the workforce, but it's *really* good for your productivity statistics.
Yep. That and having a manufacturing-based economy where productivity gains from automation are easier.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
Just one of its many eccentricities.
I have heard people rave about it for years but have never before caught up with it.
My exponential moving average (EMA) of national polls shows Kamala 2% ahead of Trump. My EC model using 538 moving averages by state shows 268 -270 Kamala to Trump.
But I'm very wary of the polls and the betting. I suspect they are being manipulated.
Based on improving economy and stock market, propensity to vote, money, ground game, trend of Trump rhetoric, Kamala's net favourability versus Trump's - I reckon it is a landslide for Kamala and have bet accordingly.
There is no chance of a Harris landslide or even her matching Biden's popular vote and EC score in 2020.
If she wins it will be scraping home over the line in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Georgia or Michigan in what looks like the closest US presidential election in the EC since 2000
My gut is that the polls are wrong, and that the winner will be clear.
Simply, polling will be out by 2-3%, and that means there will be a relatively clear victory for one candidate or another. Which one, I could tell you. But if you held a gun to my head, I think it is more likely that Trump wins.
Didn't you predict that the 2022 mid terms would have a clear winner either one way or the other ?
Of course you being wrong in 2022 doesn't mean you're going to be wrong in 2024.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
I asked my Dad about the Sixties some years back.
He answered that it was a very depressing time and everyone was talking of emigrating. (So not much change then!).
When you look at the stats on how many Brits did emigrate in the Sixties, I think this may well be more accurate than most on the decade.
It's a very confusing decade looking back (I was 5 when it started and 15 when it ended). For example it produced an extraordinary revolution in the early Beatles (unforgettable days, even though I was very young - in London it hit everyone down to 7/8 year olds) and Rolling Stones. OTOH, as Dominic Sandbrook pointed out on one of his 60's histories, it also produced overwhelmingly popular retro-trash, anodyne, saccharine junk like The Sound of Music, which cultural histories tend to overlook; they tend to written by Whig historians!
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
Did you watch the video, I don't think you did.
We could do the same in any country, at any time in history. Ask enough people a question, and you will get people giving stoopid or funny answers. Particularly if you encourage them to gave an answer other than "Don't know."
Unless you are saying that those responses are the only ones that the interviewer got?
That is a typical clickbait video. They want the hits, so they edit the funniest answers, or even encourage people to give funny or wrong answer.
You described Gen Z as being 'pretty much morons' based on that video. I'd strongly argue that that makes you the moron, not them.
It's not based solely on that video. Gen Z are absolutely dumber than the generations that preceded them. We've just masked that by making exams easier so the grades look better. I showed my younger cousin who's at uni my old maths mock exams because I was clearing out my old room at my parents house and she could do about 5 or 6 questions, good enough for a fail she got the equivalent of an A at GCSE maths last summer. That's not me saying she's stupid, she isn't, it's just that the education system has stopped teaching kids anything and gen X parents seemingly don't give any fucks about education.
Ah, okay. You are using a clickbait video to back up your own implicit biases.
As for exam papers: syllabuses change, sometimes rapidly. Here's a question I don't know the answer to: assuming you are (say) 46, so you did GCSEs 30 years ago. Could you go back and do the GCSE equivalent paper from 1964 without preparation and get a good score?
Because I've been helping my son with his maths, I've been looking at recent GCSE papers. I got an A in maths at GCSE in 1989 (the second year they were held...). There's no way I'd get an A at a recent paper without preparation, because the areas of maths covered, the format of the questions, and other things have changed. And, to be fair, I'm more than a little rusty.
With preparation; sure, I should do well. But just showing a kid a paper they've not covered the syllabus of is a little unfair.
There's a fair view YouTube videos of university mathematicians trying to do historic and modern maths papers. They don't always get them right, or find them surprisingly hard.
I’ve been helping my son with his A Level revision and I did the same with his GCSEs. The maths was impossible, of course. But the thing that got me about the other subjects, including my degree subject Geography, was the absolutely brutal marking scheme.
One recent example. A question showing a leafy upmarket street in central London. It asks you to describe 3 possible challenges of living there. We both got one: expensive housing. But the other attempts were all fails: congestion? No evidence in the photo and it doesn’t count that we know it’s London and congested. Air pollution? Likewise, no visual evidence. Crime? Nope. I can’t even remember what the correct answers were but they were silly.
Others where you’re asked to describe a process, but if you describe it using not quite the approved terminology you get no marks (the weather and climate questions were awful on that).
So I would say from my experience that the exams are bloody difficult, but also stupid.
That example is what happens when kids get spoonfed answers by teachers who just want them to pass tests and it creates the problem I described in the work situation. Graduates and juniors are completely unsuitable for real work, they have very high expectations that answers will be easy to find or they'll get spoonfed and when that doesn't happen they turn into toddlers. Two of my direct reports became fed up and we ended grad/junior roles entirely which as I said is a shame. I want to bring it back but we need a different and tougher onboarding programme and probably to extend probation to 6 months, I'm working on the former and have asked for approval on the latter. Let's see where we get to in a few months.
My exponential moving average (EMA) of national polls shows Kamala 2% ahead of Trump. My EC model using 538 moving averages by state shows 268 -270 Kamala to Trump.
But I'm very wary of the polls and the betting. I suspect they are being manipulated.
Based on improving economy and stock market, propensity to vote, money, ground game, trend of Trump rhetoric, Kamala's net favourability versus Trump's - I reckon it is a landslide for Kamala and have bet accordingly.
There are a bunch of small sample Republican polls which (I suspect intentionally) are drawing the two contenders closer together for the "stolen - again!!" mantra.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
Did you watch the video, I don't think you did.
We could do the same in any country, at any time in history. Ask enough people a question, and you will get people giving stoopid or funny answers. Particularly if you encourage them to gave an answer other than "Don't know."
Unless you are saying that those responses are the only ones that the interviewer got?
That is a typical clickbait video. They want the hits, so they edit the funniest answers, or even encourage people to give funny or wrong answer.
You described Gen Z as being 'pretty much morons' based on that video. I'd strongly argue that that makes you the moron, not them.
It's not based solely on that video. Gen Z are absolutely dumber than the generations that preceded them. We've just masked that by making exams easier so the grades look better. I showed my younger cousin who's at uni my old maths mock exams because I was clearing out my old room at my parents house and she could do about 5 or 6 questions, good enough for a fail she got the equivalent of an A at GCSE maths last summer. That's not me saying she's stupid, she isn't, it's just that the education system has stopped teaching kids anything and gen X parents seemingly don't give any fucks about education.
Ah, okay. You are using a clickbait video to back up your own implicit biases.
As for exam papers: syllabuses change, sometimes rapidly. Here's a question I don't know the answer to: assuming you are (say) 46, so you did GCSEs 30 years ago. Could you go back and do the GCSE equivalent paper from 1964 without preparation and get a good score?
Because I've been helping my son with his maths, I've been looking at recent GCSE papers. I got an A in maths at GCSE in 1989 (the second year they were held...). There's no way I'd get an A at a recent paper without preparation, because the areas of maths covered, the format of the questions, and other things have changed. And, to be fair, I'm more than a little rusty.
With preparation; sure, I should do well. But just showing a kid a paper they've not covered the syllabus of is a little unfair.
There's a fair view YouTube videos of university mathematicians trying to do historic and modern maths papers. They don't always get them right, or find them surprisingly hard.
I’ve been helping my son with his A Level revision and I did the same with his GCSEs. The maths was impossible, of course. But the thing that got me about the other subjects, including my degree subject Geography, was the absolutely brutal marking scheme.
One recent example. A question showing a leafy upmarket street in central London. It asks you to describe 3 possible challenges of living there. We both got one: expensive housing. But the other attempts were all fails: congestion? No evidence in the photo and it doesn’t count that we know it’s London and congested. Air pollution? Likewise, no visual evidence. Crime? Nope. I can’t even remember what the correct answers were but they were silly.
Others where you’re asked to describe a process, but if you describe it using not quite the approved terminology you get no marks (the weather and climate questions were awful on that).
So I would say from my experience that the exams are bloody difficult, but also stupid.
It's the thing @ydoethur can wax eloquent and furious about, and he's got a point. Less of an issue in the natural sciences, it has to be said.
Partly, it's a long-term thing; examining bodies are a lot more open about mark schemes and assessment principles than they used to be. "Just get really good at the subject, and the grade will take care of itself" mostly still works. But the openness has made the margins of error horribly narrow, so students want to play it much safer, in a "tell me the answer so I can reproduce it in the exam" way.
Secondly, there's a issue with the Goveoid reforms to GCSE and A Level. Again, they seem to have hurt the humanities more than the hard sciences, but the criteria probably aren't right, in a harmful way. But not my department. (Overall, I prefer the new courses to the old.)
Finally, the quality of marking isn't always as good as it should be. Like a lot of areas of our lives, it's optimised for efficiency and lower cost. So you get relatively dumb questions so that relatively dumb markers can mark them. And still the reliability is still a problem.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
I asked my Dad about the Sixties some years back.
He answered that it was a very depressing time and everyone was talking of emigrating. (So not much change then!).
When you look at the stats on how many Brits did emigrate in the Sixties, I think this may well be more accurate than most on the decade.
It's a very confusing decade looking back (I was 5 when it started and 15 when it ended). For example it produced an extraordinary revolution in the early Beatles (unforgettable days, even though I was very young - in London it hit everyone down to 7/8 year olds) and Rolling Stones. OTOH, as Dominic Sandbrook pointed out on one of his 60's histories, it also produced overwhelmingly popular retro-trash, anodyne, saccharine junk like The Sound of Music, which cultural histories tend to overlook; they tend to written by Whig historians!
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
I asked my Dad about the Sixties some years back.
He answered that it was a very depressing time and everyone was talking of emigrating. (So not much change then!).
When you look at the stats on how many Brits did emigrate in the Sixties, I think this may well be more accurate than most on the decade.
It wasn't for my wife and I
Got married in 1964
Moved to North Wales in 1965 to start a business
Had our first born in 1966
Lots of engagement in sport and the local community
Worked hard and above all else did not have 24/7 social media
They were happy days followed by our daughter in 1971 and our youngest in 1975
Well, my personal experience (born 1961) is that we have moved from a cash-poor, time-rich society to a cash-rich, time-poor society.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Never in the history of the Democratic-Republican duopoly dating back to the last election prior to the Civil War have both the House and Senate flipped in opposite directions. Typically the tides that pull once chamber pull both. But in recent years a new geographical concentration of the parties has given Republicans a big Senate advantage in some cycles that resists national trends.
A double-flip of House and Senate would ensure continued divided control of the federal government and, given the currently extreme polarization of the parties, very likely additional gridlock. There’s a chance of something even more remarkable happening in November, however: a triple flip of House, Senate and the White House, leaving no stone unturned. That has actually happened once in American history: in 1952, when the New Deal era emphatically ended with Dwight D. Eisenhower breaking a 20-year Democratic winning streak in presidential elections, while Republicans also flipped both chambers of Congress (which Democrats had narrowly maintained control of in 1950 despite losing a lot of seats).
Do NOT believe that "the New Deal era emphatically ended" with the election of Ike in 1952.
Seeing as how his POTUS victory had way more to do with him PLUS desire for change, than any GOP reasurgence OR change in the political dynamic established in 1932 and solidified in 1936.
Indeed, can be argued that the New Deal realignment of US politics was unchallenged for about a generation until circa-1968 (Civil Rights revolution, Vietnam War, etc.) and persisted for yet another until 1994.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
All taxes are taxes on something we value. Jobs, income, houses, buying things. All taxes directly paid by businesses or employers of any sort (rates, corporation tax etc) can be seen as a tax on jobs as they increase business costs. Employers NI is just one of the ways of spreading the pain so that the goose doesn't hiss so loudly.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
Did you watch the video, I don't think you did.
We could do the same in any country, at any time in history. Ask enough people a question, and you will get people giving stoopid or funny answers. Particularly if you encourage them to gave an answer other than "Don't know."
Unless you are saying that those responses are the only ones that the interviewer got?
That is a typical clickbait video. They want the hits, so they edit the funniest answers, or even encourage people to give funny or wrong answer.
You described Gen Z as being 'pretty much morons' based on that video. I'd strongly argue that that makes you the moron, not them.
It's not based solely on that video. Gen Z are absolutely dumber than the generations that preceded them. We've just masked that by making exams easier so the grades look better. I showed my younger cousin who's at uni my old maths mock exams because I was clearing out my old room at my parents house and she could do about 5 or 6 questions, good enough for a fail she got the equivalent of an A at GCSE maths last summer. That's not me saying she's stupid, she isn't, it's just that the education system has stopped teaching kids anything and gen X parents seemingly don't give any fucks about education.
Ah, okay. You are using a clickbait video to back up your own implicit biases.
As for exam papers: syllabuses change, sometimes rapidly. Here's a question I don't know the answer to: assuming you are (say) 46, so you did GCSEs 30 years ago. Could you go back and do the GCSE equivalent paper from 1964 without preparation and get a good score?
Because I've been helping my son with his maths, I've been looking at recent GCSE papers. I got an A in maths at GCSE in 1989 (the second year they were held...). There's no way I'd get an A at a recent paper without preparation, because the areas of maths covered, the format of the questions, and other things have changed. And, to be fair, I'm more than a little rusty.
With preparation; sure, I should do well. But just showing a kid a paper they've not covered the syllabus of is a little unfair.
There's a fair view YouTube videos of university mathematicians trying to do historic and modern maths papers. They don't always get them right, or find them surprisingly hard.
I’ve been helping my son with his A Level revision and I did the same with his GCSEs. The maths was impossible, of course. But the thing that got me about the other subjects, including my degree subject Geography, was the absolutely brutal marking scheme.
One recent example. A question showing a leafy upmarket street in central London. It asks you to describe 3 possible challenges of living there. We both got one: expensive housing. But the other attempts were all fails: congestion? No evidence in the photo and it doesn’t count that we know it’s London and congested. Air pollution? Likewise, no visual evidence. Crime? Nope. I can’t even remember what the correct answers were but they were silly.
Others where you’re asked to describe a process, but if you describe it using not quite the approved terminology you get no marks (the weather and climate questions were awful on that).
So I would say from my experience that the exams are bloody difficult, but also stupid.
That’s terrifying (and what ‘visual evidence’ was there that the houses were expensive? Were there estate agents walking along the street dresses head to toe in Chanel?)
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
I asked my Dad about the Sixties some years back.
He answered that it was a very depressing time and everyone was talking of emigrating. (So not much change then!).
When you look at the stats on how many Brits did emigrate in the Sixties, I think this may well be more accurate than most on the decade.
It's very anecdotal, but I grew up in the 60s and saw it as a time of opportunity and hope - I was a keen Communist, full of optimism about the world. Time wore the edges and the radicalism off - I didn't do anything very significant until 1997, when I was elected to Parliament as a fairly moderate Labour MP. But I've never condemned the idealism and I think we're too gloomy now.
I think it fair to say that everyone's experience of the Sixties was different. My folks were 25 and 23 in 1960 and working as a salesman and secretary in Manchester, so not exactly the Beat Generation.
I think films like "A taste of Honey" or "The Leather Boys" give an idea of life, though the social mores considered so shocking seem quite prosaic now.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Actually increasing employers NI will accelerate employers into AI and automation resulting in job loses
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
All taxes are taxes on something we value. Jobs, income, houses, buying things. All taxes directly paid by businesses or employers of any sort (rates, corporation tax etc) can be seen as a tax on jobs as they increase business costs. Employers NI is just one of the ways of spreading the pain so that the goose doesn't hiss so loudly.
For businesses there are taxes on operation / turn-over and there are taxes on profits. Its far better to tax profit than turn-over if you want to encourage growth. The complication is mega-corps are great at avoiding taxes on profits, so governments have increasingly gone after taxing companies for just operating. But this is not great if we want an economy that encourages smaller companies to expand, hire people, task a risk.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Sort of. But if we wanted to incentivise high paying work we should be putting a ceiling on the increase e.g. increase by 1% on the first £10k but not after that.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
I thought we all agreed on that too, but it seems not. It seemed to be a particularly prevalent view on the right.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Actually increasing employers NI will accelerate employers into AI and automation resulting in job loses
Perhaps so, if overdone, but getting the tax on jobs at the sweetspot to encourage productivity while minimising unemployment should be the target.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Actually increasing employers NI will accelerate employers into AI and automation resulting in job loses
Re: cluelessness of the yout' can recall my grandfather complaining circa-1964 that store cashiers were increasingly unable to make change at his local grocery store.
I think the age of the US being a superpower ends when the current generation die and the workers are Gen Z, they are pretty much morons. Millennials made tech giants, Gen Z seem to want to become streamers on twitch or only fans girls (or both).
I reckon the WW2 generation said the same about the kids in the sixties. And the WW1 generation probably said it about the generation that fought in WW2. The streamers and such are just the visible tip of the iceberg; most just get on with things, unseen.
My dad had his first kid in 1968. I once asked him if the swinging sixties were as great as they were made out. He said: "I don't know; I was too busy trying to make a living."
Whereas a friend of my parents lived the full life in the sixties, and knew lots of famous people (he was a designer, and designed a wine label that is still use to this day (*)). All the time I knew him as a kid, he was scrimping around for money, and his widow is now quite poor. Whereas my parents are having a comfortable retirement.
So don't take the visible to be the typical. It is most often untypical.
(*) I can't remember which one, but mum gets a bottle out occasionally in his memory.
Did you watch the video, I don't think you did.
We could do the same in any country, at any time in history. Ask enough people a question, and you will get people giving stoopid or funny answers. Particularly if you encourage them to gave an answer other than "Don't know."
Unless you are saying that those responses are the only ones that the interviewer got?
That is a typical clickbait video. They want the hits, so they edit the funniest answers, or even encourage people to give funny or wrong answer.
You described Gen Z as being 'pretty much morons' based on that video. I'd strongly argue that that makes you the moron, not them.
It's not based solely on that video. Gen Z are absolutely dumber than the generations that preceded them. We've just masked that by making exams easier so the grades look better. I showed my younger cousin who's at uni my old maths mock exams because I was clearing out my old room at my parents house and she could do about 5 or 6 questions, good enough for a fail she got the equivalent of an A at GCSE maths last summer. That's not me saying she's stupid, she isn't, it's just that the education system has stopped teaching kids anything and gen X parents seemingly don't give any fucks about education.
Ah, okay. You are using a clickbait video to back up your own implicit biases.
As for exam papers: syllabuses change, sometimes rapidly. Here's a question I don't know the answer to: assuming you are (say) 46, so you did GCSEs 30 years ago. Could you go back and do the GCSE equivalent paper from 1964 without preparation and get a good score?
Because I've been helping my son with his maths, I've been looking at recent GCSE papers. I got an A in maths at GCSE in 1989 (the second year they were held...). There's no way I'd get an A at a recent paper without preparation, because the areas of maths covered, the format of the questions, and other things have changed. And, to be fair, I'm more than a little rusty.
With preparation; sure, I should do well. But just showing a kid a paper they've not covered the syllabus of is a little unfair.
There's a fair view YouTube videos of university mathematicians trying to do historic and modern maths papers. They don't always get them right, or find them surprisingly hard.
I’ve been helping my son with his A Level revision and I did the same with his GCSEs. The maths was impossible, of course. But the thing that got me about the other subjects, including my degree subject Geography, was the absolutely brutal marking scheme.
One recent example. A question showing a leafy upmarket street in central London. It asks you to describe 3 possible challenges of living there. We both got one: expensive housing. But the other attempts were all fails: congestion? No evidence in the photo and it doesn’t count that we know it’s London and congested. Air pollution? Likewise, no visual evidence. Crime? Nope. I can’t even remember what the correct answers were but they were silly.
Others where you’re asked to describe a process, but if you describe it using not quite the approved terminology you get no marks (the weather and climate questions were awful on that).
So I would say from my experience that the exams are bloody difficult, but also stupid.
Questions like that seem designed to make teachers look good, since only they are in a position to impart the esoteric knowledge needed to give the answer the exam boards are looking for, and they can do it even for students who lack much ability.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
There is an easy solution to that side of the equation, increase the minimum wage level to get a work visa and put quotas (and if you want some flexibility we can still have nurses, post-docs, etc). The problem every government just backs down from this, the current one already ditched the higher level that was programmed in.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Wouldn't we then need for employers NI to be a regressive tax, a higher percentage at lower incomes so that high value employment is encouraged over throwing cheap labour at a problem. Make it better for a company to hire 2 or 3 automation engineers and invest in capital rather than 30 minimum wage labourers?
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
All taxes are taxes on something we value. Jobs, income, houses, buying things. All taxes directly paid by businesses or employers of any sort (rates, corporation tax etc) can be seen as a tax on jobs as they increase business costs. Employers NI is just one of the ways of spreading the pain so that the goose doesn't hiss so loudly.
And it doesn’t all get passed on to employees. I remember years ago in an in-house job, the bosses wanted to pay their French PDG a 100k bonus, same as his other European counterparts. So they had to gross it up by 200% and budget for 300k. They didn’t pay him less. They probably charged their clients more or earned less profit instead, or made it up in other ways. So the cost spreads out into the economy as do most tax costs.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
All taxes are taxes on something we value. Jobs, income, houses, buying things. All taxes directly paid by businesses or employers of any sort (rates, corporation tax etc) can be seen as a tax on jobs as they increase business costs. Employers NI is just one of the ways of spreading the pain so that the goose doesn't hiss so loudly.
For businesses there are taxes on operation / turn-over and there are taxes on profits. Its far better to tax profit than turn-over if you want to encourage growth. The complication is mega-corps are great at avoiding taxes on profits, so governments have increasingly gone after taxing companies for just operating. But this is not great if we want an economy that encourages smaller companies to expand, hire people, task a risk.
These things are not easy. For example, does the VAT threshold operate as a spur to start up very small businesses while avoiding the admin and costs of VAT liability, or does it operate as a brake on those businesses expanding? Both are equally arguable.
Frankly, whether or not something breaches the manifesto is unimportant. Is it good policy ?
Ii is a tax on jobs, so no
But one of the things I thought we all agreed on was that too many employers just throw extra staff at problems, when they should be investing in plant and training to do the same work with fewer people? Hence the need to import uncomfortable numbers of workers into the UK?
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
Actually increasing employers NI will accelerate employers into AI and automation resulting in job loses
No economy ever thrived long term by protecting existing jobs at the expense of holding back new technology.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
Combine, get rid of the differing thresholds and the cliff edges. Its simplifies the whole system and we don't get this stupid situation of people on £50-60k and £100-120k not wanting to work anymore hours / take on more responsibility / take a pay rise, because they get walloped for 80p in the pound.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
Combine, get rid of the differing thresholds and the cliff edges. Its simplifies the whole system and we don't get this stupid situation of people on £50-60k and £100-120k not wanting to work anymore hours / take on more responsibility / take a pay rise, because they get walloped for 80p in the pound.
If only you'd been the one whispering in Truss's ear, this could have been her mini-budget.
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
There was an opportunity to use this budget as a trigger for some real radical tax reform, but I don’t think we’re going to see that unless they’ve been keeping extremely good secrets.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
One of the things I during the lockdown was watch all of the episodes. Some of the number twos are very memorable.
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
Combine, get rid of the differing thresholds and the cliff edges. Its simplifies the whole system and we don't get this stupid situation of people on £50-60k and £100-120k not wanting to work anymore hours / take on more responsibility / take a pay rise, because they get walloped for 80p in the pound.
If only you'd been the one whispering in Truss's ear, this could have been her mini-budget.
The TRUSS is ever-listening, William. She will save Francis’ insights for her gleeful return to the bully pulpit, which many will welcome - and celebrate.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
I believe episode four features a young Mark Drakeford as a traffic policeman.
So, let me get this right... the public are in outcry because Elon Musk didn't get an investment summit invite, meaning Starmer is now finished? Absolutely desperate stuff. What awareness of the summit does the man on the Clapham omnibus even have?
Quite a lot, judging by Starmer’s appalling personal polling
The voter may not know the deets, but they can spot a dud prime minister
That's largely based on the WFA cut, freebie gate, and *maybe* (for certain parts of the electorate) stuff like the Chagos Islands deal. I doubt barely more than a tenth of the electorate even know about 'Muskgate'.
I doubt 1 in 100 do
The point is the air of “weird greedy inept hectoring hypocrite” has settled around Starmer. It will be hard to shift
It might be hard to shift but the Tories seem intent on delivering either the walking slime Jenrick or the in need of anger management classes Badenoch as an alternative.
They will just have to be less bad than Starmer
And so far that is looking quite easy. We shall see
I expect that whoever they pick now will be gone before the next election .
I’m not so sure. For the Tories to drop this leader the polls would have to be really bad for them
Right now they have already caught up and are level pegging with Labour, despite reform hitting 20%
It would need Labour to recover (obviously possible) or reform to overtake the Tories (also possible)
Another possibility is that the Tories go into the lead and stay there. And then they won’t have any desire to ditch Jenrick or Badenoch
Indeed, this is NOT 1997 in case leftwing PBers have not realised or even 2001.
Then Blair had double digit leads in post election polls in the former and comfortable leads after the latter election too, now Labour is already down to Brown 2010 levels and Starmer already polling worse than Badenoch and Jenrick on net approval ratings.
Blair was always comfortably ahead of Hague and IDS on net approval polling
The thing that augurs in favour of ditching though is the bar being very low for a challenge and quite a few MPs (roughly a third?) quite possibly being irreconcilables to Badenoch or Jenrick 2.0 if they're not obviously looking like winning. It wouldn't need IDS-style polling to start manoeuvres.
Given 2/3 of Tory MPs voted for Jenrick or Badenoch there simply aren't the numbers for say a Cleverly coronation unless either massively behind which is extremely unlikely given how unpopular Starmer and his government now are
Yeah. It wouldn't be a coronation - you'd imagine it'd be the right v moderate battle we were deprived of this time - with those who backed the last round loser this time finding a reason the incumbent was crap, and a Cleverly caucus around the idea that the party needs wholesale change.
I disagree on them needing to be miles behind. If they are behind pretty much at all, particularly if Reform look a serious prospect as a parliamentary party, there'll be soundings. And in a way understandably so, as they are in a fairly precarious position if Labour are unloved but "given another chance" given both Reform and the Lib Dems will be looking to eat a Tory Party that doesn't look like returning to government's lunch.
And on that front Labour and them bumping around the high to upper mid 20s probably isn't good enough, given that absent mass Reform gains (which would come at their expense to some extent) they are uncoalitionable.
At the moment it is Reform eating heavily into the Labour vote on current polls, the Tories and LDs virtually unchanged since the general election.
Jenrick and Badenoch far more likely to agree a coalition government with Farage than Cleverly could
Sure they'll be eating into the Labour vote. But there are 121 Tory MPs. Reform have 5. To get the numbers for a coalition they'd need at least around 20-30, assuming the Tories get up to 290+ - which you'd have thought would be at the top end of what they can expect assuming they and Labour are relatively close (which one is for the sake of the argument - which was predicated on that).
If they are doing that well some of that's likely eating further into Tory as well as Labour votes, as well as Labour persuadables - i.e. Leave leaning, culturally conservative voters who went Labour because were fed up with the Tories.
Other voters are now simply off limits to the Tories/Reform in a way that may not have been for the former at least in the past. The story of the last election was incredibly efficient anti-Tory voting. Might that switch to anti-Labour? Perhaps, but I doubt it, as a significant chunk of those are just far more averse to the current Tory Party even when they are pissed off at Labour.
Anyway, my point was that to have any confidence of winning the Tories probably need a reasonable lead and to show signs they are making some progress with those who've completely written them off in a way hadn't before. A leader who doesn't get there may be more vulnerable than one may think given another very difficult election might be existential for them.
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
Combine, get rid of the differing thresholds and the cliff edges. Its simplifies the whole system and we don't get this stupid situation of people on £50-60k and £100-120k not wanting to work anymore hours / take on more responsibility / take a pay rise, because they get walloped for 80p in the pound.
Agree, though my back-of-envelope distributional analysis finds that it would be rather tricky to retain the same tax take without walloping high earners with >50% rates. Employee NICs is relatively regressive.
It would require some clever adjustments... and whenever you make such adjustments you spawn yet more unanticipated effects. They should give it a shot though.
(Just remember when Sunak cut NICs - pensioners went ballistic in the Mail/Telegraph comments because they didn't get it.)
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
I found this impassioned piece by John Harris (who has an autistic child) on Badenoch apparently roping autistic kids into her garbage culture wars enlightening. I had imagined somewhat naively that she couldn't be a worse human being than Robert Jenrick, but perhaps I need to reassess that position.
Never mind employers NI increases, what about applying NI (or an equivalent income tax surcharge) to unearned income?
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
A big mistake Osborne made was not to go ahead and combine NI and IC on the employee side.
It would have been doubly beneficial politically because it would have given everyone a pay rise on paper while also making the true level of taxation on income more transparent.
Combine, get rid of the differing thresholds and the cliff edges. Its simplifies the whole system and we don't get this stupid situation of people on £50-60k and £100-120k not wanting to work anymore hours / take on more responsibility / take a pay rise, because they get walloped for 80p in the pound.
Agree, though my back-of-envelope distributional analysis finds that it would be rather tricky to retain the same tax take without walloping high earners with >50% rates. Employee NICs is relatively regressive.
It would require some clever adjustments... and whenever you make such adjustments you spawn yet more unanticipated effects. They should give it a shot though.
(Just remember when Sunak cut NICs - pensioners went ballistic in the Mail/Telegraph comments because they didn't get it.)
I’d rather pay 50% income tax and it be clear than marginal rates of 62% which are a pure accident of clients phasing projects into the next tax year.
So, let me get this right... the public are in outcry because Elon Musk didn't get an investment summit invite, meaning Starmer is now finished? Absolutely desperate stuff. What awareness of the summit does the man on the Clapham omnibus even have?
Quite a lot, judging by Starmer’s appalling personal polling
The voter may not know the deets, but they can spot a dud prime minister
That's largely based on the WFA cut, freebie gate, and *maybe* (for certain parts of the electorate) stuff like the Chagos Islands deal. I doubt barely more than a tenth of the electorate even know about 'Muskgate'.
I doubt 1 in 100 do
The point is the air of “weird greedy inept hectoring hypocrite” has settled around Starmer. It will be hard to shift
It might be hard to shift but the Tories seem intent on delivering either the walking slime Jenrick or the in need of anger management classes Badenoch as an alternative.
They will just have to be less bad than Starmer
And so far that is looking quite easy. We shall see
I expect that whoever they pick now will be gone before the next election .
I’m not so sure. For the Tories to drop this leader the polls would have to be really bad for them
Right now they have already caught up and are level pegging with Labour, despite reform hitting 20%
It would need Labour to recover (obviously possible) or reform to overtake the Tories (also possible)
Another possibility is that the Tories go into the lead and stay there. And then they won’t have any desire to ditch Jenrick or Badenoch
Indeed, this is NOT 1997 in case leftwing PBers have not realised or even 2001.
Then Blair had double digit leads in post election polls in the former and comfortable leads after the latter election too, now Labour is already down to Brown 2010 levels and Starmer already polling worse than Badenoch and Jenrick on net approval ratings.
Blair was always comfortably ahead of Hague and IDS on net approval polling
The thing that augurs in favour of ditching though is the bar being very low for a challenge and quite a few MPs (roughly a third?) quite possibly being irreconcilables to Badenoch or Jenrick 2.0 if they're not obviously looking like winning. It wouldn't need IDS-style polling to start manoeuvres.
Given 2/3 of Tory MPs voted for Jenrick or Badenoch there simply aren't the numbers for say a Cleverly coronation unless either massively behind which is extremely unlikely given how unpopular Starmer and his government now are
Yeah. It wouldn't be a coronation - you'd imagine it'd be the right v moderate battle we were deprived of this time - with those who backed the last round loser this time finding a reason the incumbent was crap, and a Cleverly caucus around the idea that the party needs wholesale change.
I disagree on them needing to be miles behind. If they are behind pretty much at all, particularly if Reform look a serious prospect as a parliamentary party, there'll be soundings. And in a way understandably so, as they are in a fairly precarious position if Labour are unloved but "given another chance" given both Reform and the Lib Dems will be looking to eat a Tory Party that doesn't look like returning to government's lunch.
And on that front Labour and them bumping around the high to upper mid 20s probably isn't good enough, given that absent mass Reform gains (which would come at their expense to some extent) they are uncoalitionable.
At the moment it is Reform eating heavily into the Labour vote on current polls, the Tories and LDs virtually unchanged since the general election.
Jenrick and Badenoch far more likely to agree a coalition government with Farage than Cleverly could
Sure they'll be eating into the Labour vote. But there are 121 Tory MPs. Reform have 5. To get the numbers for a coalition they'd need at least around 20-30, assuming the Tories get up to 290+ - which you'd have thought would be at the top end of what they can expect assuming they and Labour are relatively close (which one is for the sake of the argument - which was predicated on that).
If they are doing that well some of that's likely eating further into Tory as well as Labour votes, as well as Labour persuadables - i.e. Leave leaning, culturally conservative voters who went Labour because were fed up with the Tories.
Other voters are now simply off limits to the Tories/Reform in a way that may not have been for the former at least in the past. The story of the last election was incredibly efficient anti-Tory voting. Might that switch to anti-Labour? Perhaps, but I doubt it, as a significant chunk of those are just far more averse to the current Tory Party even when they are pissed off at Labour.
Anyway, my point was that to have any confidence of winning the Tories probably need a reasonable lead and to show signs they are making some progress with those who've completely written them off in a way hadn't before. A leader who doesn't get there may be more vulnerable than one may think given another very difficult election might be existential for them.
Interesting thread here arguing that even if Cons sweep up every Reform voter, they are still short of a majority.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
FYI, personally started viewing "The Prisoner" circa-1970 or whenever it began airing on US tv. So Kafka bit is old hat to an old fart like me.
However, am disturbed (yeh, that's NOT news either) that you believe (maybe) that the show's producers were anti-Cymric bigots who banned Welsh people from the set?
Sorta like how the Normans kicked the Wild Irish out of Norman settlements in Ireland, which is why many towns today have inner suburbs dubbed (rather incongruously) "Irishtown".
Addendum - Just kidding, Dr. Foxy. Sense that you have the zeal of a convert!
So, let me get this right... the public are in outcry because Elon Musk didn't get an investment summit invite, meaning Starmer is now finished? Absolutely desperate stuff. What awareness of the summit does the man on the Clapham omnibus even have?
Quite a lot, judging by Starmer’s appalling personal polling
The voter may not know the deets, but they can spot a dud prime minister
That's largely based on the WFA cut, freebie gate, and *maybe* (for certain parts of the electorate) stuff like the Chagos Islands deal. I doubt barely more than a tenth of the electorate even know about 'Muskgate'.
I doubt 1 in 100 do
The point is the air of “weird greedy inept hectoring hypocrite” has settled around Starmer. It will be hard to shift
It might be hard to shift but the Tories seem intent on delivering either the walking slime Jenrick or the in need of anger management classes Badenoch as an alternative.
They will just have to be less bad than Starmer
And so far that is looking quite easy. We shall see
I expect that whoever they pick now will be gone before the next election .
I’m not so sure. For the Tories to drop this leader the polls would have to be really bad for them
Right now they have already caught up and are level pegging with Labour, despite reform hitting 20%
It would need Labour to recover (obviously possible) or reform to overtake the Tories (also possible)
Another possibility is that the Tories go into the lead and stay there. And then they won’t have any desire to ditch Jenrick or Badenoch
Indeed, this is NOT 1997 in case leftwing PBers have not realised or even 2001.
Then Blair had double digit leads in post election polls in the former and comfortable leads after the latter election too, now Labour is already down to Brown 2010 levels and Starmer already polling worse than Badenoch and Jenrick on net approval ratings.
Blair was always comfortably ahead of Hague and IDS on net approval polling
The thing that augurs in favour of ditching though is the bar being very low for a challenge and quite a few MPs (roughly a third?) quite possibly being irreconcilables to Badenoch or Jenrick 2.0 if they're not obviously looking like winning. It wouldn't need IDS-style polling to start manoeuvres.
Given 2/3 of Tory MPs voted for Jenrick or Badenoch there simply aren't the numbers for say a Cleverly coronation unless either massively behind which is extremely unlikely given how unpopular Starmer and his government now are
Yeah. It wouldn't be a coronation - you'd imagine it'd be the right v moderate battle we were deprived of this time - with those who backed the last round loser this time finding a reason the incumbent was crap, and a Cleverly caucus around the idea that the party needs wholesale change.
I disagree on them needing to be miles behind. If they are behind pretty much at all, particularly if Reform look a serious prospect as a parliamentary party, there'll be soundings. And in a way understandably so, as they are in a fairly precarious position if Labour are unloved but "given another chance" given both Reform and the Lib Dems will be looking to eat a Tory Party that doesn't look like returning to government's lunch.
And on that front Labour and them bumping around the high to upper mid 20s probably isn't good enough, given that absent mass Reform gains (which would come at their expense to some extent) they are uncoalitionable.
At the moment it is Reform eating heavily into the Labour vote on current polls, the Tories and LDs virtually unchanged since the general election.
Jenrick and Badenoch far more likely to agree a coalition government with Farage than Cleverly could
Sure they'll be eating into the Labour vote. But there are 121 Tory MPs. Reform have 5. To get the numbers for a coalition they'd need at least around 20-30, assuming the Tories get up to 290+ - which you'd have thought would be at the top end of what they can expect assuming they and Labour are relatively close (which one is for the sake of the argument - which was predicated on that).
If they are doing that well some of that's likely eating further into Tory as well as Labour votes, as well as Labour persuadables - i.e. Leave leaning, culturally conservative voters who went Labour because were fed up with the Tories.
Other voters are now simply off limits to the Tories/Reform in a way that may not have been for the former at least in the past. The story of the last election was incredibly efficient anti-Tory voting. Might that switch to anti-Labour? Perhaps, but I doubt it, as a significant chunk of those are just far more averse to the current Tory Party even when they are pissed off at Labour.
Anyway, my point was that to have any confidence of winning the Tories probably need a reasonable lead and to show signs they are making some progress with those who've completely written them off in a way hadn't before. A leader who doesn't get there may be more vulnerable than one may think given another very difficult election might be existential for them.
After getting over a stroke, I've resumed canvassing regularly (for Labour's candidates in the County elections next year). There's very little enthusiasm for anyone out there in my experience, but Labour/LibDem/Green votes are pretty interchangeable, giving that high efficiency that produced the 2024 result. Tory and Reform voters are less interchageable, and almost nobody seems interested in crossing over from left to right or right to left.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
Its weakness is that every episode is essentially the same plot, but I haven’t watched it for decades so maybe I’d enjoy it more now.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
Incorrect. It is briefly referred to as "off the coast of Lithuania. Implying it is used by all sides.
Increasing employers NI makes employing people in the UK (as opposed to other potential countries) more expensive. It has a depressing effect on wages which reduces demand. It discourages the employment of labour at the margins.
I know that Reeves got some of her training at the BoE, which is a major hurdle for anyone to overcome, but in what world and according to what economic theory does she think such a self destructive policy “encourages growth” as all her policies were supposed to?
People on this site go on and on about what a pompous, greedy and politically inept leader Starmer is, and most of that is true, but Reeves seems to be determined to do real harm. It’s bewildering.
So, let me get this right... the public are in outcry because Elon Musk didn't get an investment summit invite, meaning Starmer is now finished? Absolutely desperate stuff. What awareness of the summit does the man on the Clapham omnibus even have?
Quite a lot, judging by Starmer’s appalling personal polling
The voter may not know the deets, but they can spot a dud prime minister
That's largely based on the WFA cut, freebie gate, and *maybe* (for certain parts of the electorate) stuff like the Chagos Islands deal. I doubt barely more than a tenth of the electorate even know about 'Muskgate'.
I doubt 1 in 100 do
The point is the air of “weird greedy inept hectoring hypocrite” has settled around Starmer. It will be hard to shift
It might be hard to shift but the Tories seem intent on delivering either the walking slime Jenrick or the in need of anger management classes Badenoch as an alternative.
They will just have to be less bad than Starmer
And so far that is looking quite easy. We shall see
I expect that whoever they pick now will be gone before the next election .
I’m not so sure. For the Tories to drop this leader the polls would have to be really bad for them
Right now they have already caught up and are level pegging with Labour, despite reform hitting 20%
It would need Labour to recover (obviously possible) or reform to overtake the Tories (also possible)
Another possibility is that the Tories go into the lead and stay there. And then they won’t have any desire to ditch Jenrick or Badenoch
Indeed, this is NOT 1997 in case leftwing PBers have not realised or even 2001.
Then Blair had double digit leads in post election polls in the former and comfortable leads after the latter election too, now Labour is already down to Brown 2010 levels and Starmer already polling worse than Badenoch and Jenrick on net approval ratings.
Blair was always comfortably ahead of Hague and IDS on net approval polling
The thing that augurs in favour of ditching though is the bar being very low for a challenge and quite a few MPs (roughly a third?) quite possibly being irreconcilables to Badenoch or Jenrick 2.0 if they're not obviously looking like winning. It wouldn't need IDS-style polling to start manoeuvres.
Given 2/3 of Tory MPs voted for Jenrick or Badenoch there simply aren't the numbers for say a Cleverly coronation unless either massively behind which is extremely unlikely given how unpopular Starmer and his government now are
Yeah. It wouldn't be a coronation - you'd imagine it'd be the right v moderate battle we were deprived of this time - with those who backed the last round loser this time finding a reason the incumbent was crap, and a Cleverly caucus around the idea that the party needs wholesale change.
I disagree on them needing to be miles behind. If they are behind pretty much at all, particularly if Reform look a serious prospect as a parliamentary party, there'll be soundings. And in a way understandably so, as they are in a fairly precarious position if Labour are unloved but "given another chance" given both Reform and the Lib Dems will be looking to eat a Tory Party that doesn't look like returning to government's lunch.
And on that front Labour and them bumping around the high to upper mid 20s probably isn't good enough, given that absent mass Reform gains (which would come at their expense to some extent) they are uncoalitionable.
At the moment it is Reform eating heavily into the Labour vote on current polls, the Tories and LDs virtually unchanged since the general election.
Jenrick and Badenoch far more likely to agree a coalition government with Farage than Cleverly could
Sure they'll be eating into the Labour vote. But there are 121 Tory MPs. Reform have 5. To get the numbers for a coalition they'd need at least around 20-30, assuming the Tories get up to 290+ - which you'd have thought would be at the top end of what they can expect assuming they and Labour are relatively close (which one is for the sake of the argument - which was predicated on that).
If they are doing that well some of that's likely eating further into Tory as well as Labour votes, as well as Labour persuadables - i.e. Leave leaning, culturally conservative voters who went Labour because were fed up with the Tories.
Other voters are now simply off limits to the Tories/Reform in a way that may not have been for the former at least in the past. The story of the last election was incredibly efficient anti-Tory voting. Might that switch to anti-Labour? Perhaps, but I doubt it, as a significant chunk of those are just far more averse to the current Tory Party even when they are pissed off at Labour.
Anyway, my point was that to have any confidence of winning the Tories probably need a reasonable lead and to show signs they are making some progress with those who've completely written them off in a way hadn't before. A leader who doesn't get there may be more vulnerable than one may think given another very difficult election might be existential for them.
I think you're overestimating the commitment of the Labour/Lib Dem vote. We now have 21 Reform, 27 Tory - that's 48 vs. 52 for right wing parties, that's a radical turnaround from the election and it will increase well beyond 50% in time.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
Incorrect. It is briefly referred to as "off the coast of Lithuania. Implying it is used by all sides.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
Incorrect. It is briefly referred to as "off the coast of Lithuania. Implying it is used by all sides.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
Its weakness is that every episode is essentially the same plot, but I haven’t watched it for decades so maybe I’d enjoy it more now.
Sixties quiz: One of these men played a major part in "The Prisoner". Paul Simon wrote a song about the other.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
Incorrect. It is briefly referred to as "off the coast of Lithuania. Implying it is used by all sides.
That's what Number One wants you to believe...
I am not 100% convinced we should allow these re-runs. Let’s not give the GB News viewers any more ideas for their conspiracy theories….
A radical budget might increase employers NI but allow full expensing of capex.
Ooooo... That would be interesting. A switch away from a the focus on 'job creation' towards automation and innovation. I suppose only a Labour government could get away with it.
Increasing employers NI makes employing people in the UK (as opposed to other potential countries) more expensive. It has a depressing effect on wages which reduces demand. It discourages the employment of labour at the margins.
I know that Reeves got some of her training at the BoE, which is a major hurdle for anyone to overcome, but in what world and according to what economic theory does she think such a self destructive policy “encourages growth” as all her policies were supposed to?
People on this site go on and on about what a pompous, greedy and politically inept leader Starmer is, and most of that is true, but Reeves seems to be determined to do real harm. It’s bewildering.
It’s also politically tone deaf. Expect lots of attacks on “Labour’s job tax”, even more so when we hit a Recession (we will in the next 5 years) and job losses.
A radical budget might increase employers NI but allow full expensing of capex.
Separately, it might lower income in favour of a local property tax, estimated at say 0.25% of value.
Finally it would end the triple lock in favour of ending the two child benefit cap, and allowing full expensing of childcare.
We do have full expensing of capex. They’ll keep it too.
I understand the fears around raising employers NI but it’s one part of the tax system where we are a big outlier compared with most peer countries. I believe it could be raised by a couple of percent and cause less economic chill than other comparable scale tax rises elsewhere in the system (and tax does need to rise or spending be cut, which would also have an economic chilling effect). There are no easy options.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
Its weakness is that every episode is essentially the same plot, but I haven’t watched it for decades so maybe I’d enjoy it more now.
Sixties quiz: One of these men played a major part in "The Prisoner". Paul Simon wrote a song about the other.
I kinda recognise the guy on the left, but not sure who he is or what role he played.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
Its weakness is that every episode is essentially the same plot, but I haven’t watched it for decades so maybe I’d enjoy it more now.
I think it was one of those where only around 6 of the 18 episodes are essential to the overall story and the rest were filler in a pretty chaotic writing and production schedule. For a classic it is a mess quite a bit of the time.
I found this impassioned piece by John Harris (who has an autistic child) on Badenoch apparently roping autistic kids into her garbage culture wars enlightening. I had imagined somewhat naively that she couldn't be a worse human being than Robert Jenrick, but perhaps I need to reassess that position.
From a distance, I'd describe the difference like this.
Badenoch has a world view, a vision of how things should be. Things and people that don't fit that world view just end up in her blind spot. In this case, the economic drag of people with needs is visible to her and the people-ness of the people causing it somehow doesn't register. (It's a bit like the way that JCorbz couldn't see the suffering caused by antisemitism. In both cases, it was a complication to a reasuuringly simple worldview, so it just got cut off.)
Jenrick's world view doesn't seem to extend much beyond that he should be Prime Minister. And if his convictions get in the way of that, fear not for he has others. Hence the hope some have expressed that he is just saying stuff to win the leadership election, and then he will find a phone box to change back into mild mannered Clark Kent. When he does stuff (like the murals thing), he probably does sort of regret it, but he has to follow the people if he wants to lead them...
It doesn't really matter which one is worse from a human morality point of view, you can make a case either way. The overall effect is pretty much the same. (I don't have a vote, natch, but I think @TSE's analogy of treatable vs. untreatable STI pretty much covers it.)
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
Its weakness is that every episode is essentially the same plot, but I haven’t watched it for decades so maybe I’d enjoy it more now.
I think it was one of those where only around 6 of the 18 episodes are essential to the overall story and the rest were filler in a pretty chaotic writing and production schedule. For a classic it is a mess quite a bit of the time.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
Incorrect. It is briefly referred to as "off the coast of Lithuania. Implying it is used by all sides.
That’s not correct.
Multiple locations are claimed for the Village, in the series. All are lies.
The rough location is given away in the last episode.
Incidentally for fans of the Swinging Sixties, The Prisoner is being re-run on Rewind TV, on now. I have become a bit of a fan and can see why it has such a cult following.
Filmed in Portmeirion in 1966 and 1967
SO was/is "The Prisoner" a sympathetic portrayl of contemporary Welsh life?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
While filmed in Portmerion, no one in it is Welsh.
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
I watched it the first time round and found it totally tedious.
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
Its weakness is that every episode is essentially the same plot, but I haven’t watched it for decades so maybe I’d enjoy it more now.
Sixties quiz: One of these men played a major part in "The Prisoner". Paul Simon wrote a song about the other.
I kinda recognise the guy on the left, but not sure who he is or what role he played.
Comments
In 2024-25 income tax will raise approx £302.7 billion. This represents only 26.6 per cent of all public sector receipts and is equivalent to around £10,400 per household. (OBR)
IMHO consumption is the place to go for tax raising, despite the VAT pledge. 5% VAT on all food would raise a lot of money, and annoy an awful lot of people. The other place to go is land/property - you can't hide it.
Apart from those employees who would be made redundant or never taken on to begin with.
Why do you hate workers so much ?
Is it good policy ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis#Origin
One recent example. A question showing a leafy upmarket street in central London. It asks you to describe 3 possible challenges of living there. We both got one: expensive housing. But the other attempts were all fails: congestion? No evidence in the photo and it doesn’t count that we know it’s London and congested. Air pollution? Likewise, no visual evidence. Crime? Nope. I can’t even remember what the correct answers were but they were silly.
Others where you’re asked to describe a process, but if you describe it using not quite the approved terminology you get no marks (the weather and climate questions were awful on that).
So I would say from my experience that the exams are bloody difficult, but also stupid.
France typically has higher unemployment and lower participation rates than the UK, but the Netherlands is the opposite.
I have heard people rave about it for years but have never before caught up with it.
This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I am thinking about the young Indigenous leaders I met in Arizona last week.
I am counting on their leadership and looking forward to our partnership.
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1845916348318163037
Of course you being wrong in 2022 doesn't mean you're going to be wrong in 2024.
https://kpmg.com/bs/en/home/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/tax-rates-online/social-security-employer-tax-rates-table.html
Leon would love it
https://x.com/ThomasMusket/status/1845916623753842965
If you want higher taxes then the simplest and fairest way is to increase income tax or to increase VAT or to increase council tax.
Lets increase taxes which everyone pay not just the half of the country which does the work and creates the wealth.
I'm with you. Harris, quite comfortably.
Partly, it's a long-term thing; examining bodies are a lot more open about mark schemes and assessment principles than they used to be. "Just get really good at the subject, and the grade will take care of itself" mostly still works. But the openness has made the margins of error horribly narrow, so students want to play it much safer, in a "tell me the answer so I can reproduce it in the exam" way.
Secondly, there's a issue with the Goveoid reforms to GCSE and A Level. Again, they seem to have hurt the humanities more than the hard sciences, but the criteria probably aren't right, in a harmful way. But not my department. (Overall, I prefer the new courses to the old.)
Finally, the quality of marking isn't always as good as it should be. Like a lot of areas of our lives, it's optimised for efficiency and lower cost. So you get relatively dumb questions so that relatively dumb markers can mark them. And still the reliability is still a problem.
https://youtu.be/2G-BNvZvz8I?si=KzGnUeZPrLdliikI
Seeing as how his POTUS victory had way more to do with him PLUS desire for change, than any GOP reasurgence OR change in the political dynamic established in 1932 and solidified in 1936.
Indeed, can be argued that the New Deal realignment of US politics was unchallenged for about a generation until circa-1968 (Civil Rights revolution, Vietnam War, etc.) and persisted for yet another until 1994.
Which would imply that the tax on jobs should be a bit higher, to discourage low value-added work?
I think films like "A taste of Honey" or "The Leather Boys" give an idea of life, though the social mores considered so shocking seem quite prosaic now.
And NOT because of any aversion to cash per se!
Why do people who work for a living have to pay more of their income in tax than those who, like me, loaf around posting on PB all day?
BUT with the "Blob" in place of current speed limit!
It's never explained where "The Village" is, or why it exists or even which side it is operating for. It's like Kafka adapted by psychedelic spies.
If they are doing that well some of that's likely eating further into Tory as well as Labour votes, as well as Labour persuadables - i.e. Leave leaning, culturally conservative voters who went Labour because were fed up with the Tories.
Other voters are now simply off limits to the Tories/Reform in a way that may not have been for the former at least in the past. The story of the last election was incredibly efficient anti-Tory voting. Might that switch to anti-Labour? Perhaps, but I doubt it, as a significant chunk of those are just far more averse to the current Tory Party even when they are pissed off at Labour.
Anyway, my point was that to have any confidence of winning the Tories probably need a reasonable lead and to show signs they are making some progress with those who've completely written them off in a way hadn't before. A leader who doesn't get there may be more vulnerable than one may think given another very difficult election might be existential for them.
It would require some clever adjustments... and whenever you make such adjustments you spawn yet more unanticipated effects. They should give it a shot though.
(Just remember when Sunak cut NICs - pensioners went ballistic in the Mail/Telegraph comments because they didn't get it.)
(Ok I was only 7 at the time but still...)
I found this impassioned piece by John Harris (who has an autistic child) on Badenoch apparently roping autistic kids into her garbage culture wars enlightening. I had imagined somewhat naively that she couldn't be a worse human being than Robert Jenrick, but perhaps I need to reassess that position.
Impose a tax on free clothes and glasses.
https://bsky.app/profile/robfordmancs.bsky.social/post/3l65oimfmd424
Obviously a week is a long time in politics and 4 years a lot longer.
However, am disturbed (yeh, that's NOT news either) that you believe (maybe) that the show's producers were anti-Cymric bigots who banned Welsh people from the set?
Sorta like how the Normans kicked the Wild Irish out of Norman settlements in Ireland, which is why many towns today have inner suburbs dubbed (rather incongruously) "Irishtown".
Addendum - Just kidding, Dr. Foxy. Sense that you have the zeal of a convert!
I know that Reeves got some of her training at the BoE, which is a major hurdle for anyone to overcome, but in what world and according to what economic theory does she think such a self destructive policy “encourages growth” as all her policies were supposed to?
People on this site go on and on about what a pompous, greedy and politically inept leader Starmer is, and most of that is true, but Reeves seems to be determined to do real harm. It’s bewildering.
Separately, it might lower income in favour of a local property tax, estimated at say 0.25% of value.
Finally it would end the triple lock in favour of ending the two child benefit cap, and allowing full expensing of childcare.
And concur re: Ms LunarBunny.
I understand the fears around raising employers NI but it’s one part of the tax system where we are a big outlier compared with most peer countries. I believe it could be raised by a couple of percent and cause less economic chill than other comparable scale tax rises elsewhere in the system (and tax does need to rise or spending be cut, which would also have an economic chilling effect). There are no easy options.
https://www.abc.net.au/news
Badenoch has a world view, a vision of how things should be. Things and people that don't fit that world view just end up in her blind spot. In this case, the economic drag of people with needs is visible to her and the people-ness of the people causing it somehow doesn't register. (It's a bit like the way that JCorbz couldn't see the suffering caused by antisemitism. In both cases, it was a complication to a reasuuringly simple worldview, so it just got cut off.)
Jenrick's world view doesn't seem to extend much beyond that he should be Prime Minister. And if his convictions get in the way of that, fear not for he has others. Hence the hope some have expressed that he is just saying stuff to win the leadership election, and then he will find a phone box to change back into mild mannered Clark Kent. When he does stuff (like the murals thing), he probably does sort of regret it, but he has to follow the people if he wants to lead them...
It doesn't really matter which one is worse from a human morality point of view, you can make a case either way. The overall effect is pretty much the same. (I don't have a vote, natch, but I think @TSE's analogy of treatable vs. untreatable STI pretty much covers it.)
Multiple locations are claimed for the Village, in the series. All are lies.
The rough location is given away in the last episode.