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Does Kemi need to be more modest and self effacing? – politicalbetting.com
Does Kemi need to be more modest and self effacing? – politicalbetting.com
The Critic have published an article focusing on what they see as Kemi Badenoch’s Achilles’ heel
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Good morning all…looks like another sunny day is on the way….
Have you SEEN today's papers?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyv47mpdly0o
It would just come over as totally inauthentic.
I am not sure this is a valid criticism per se, every party leader often has a fanatical amount of self belief, I am sure similar criticisms would have been aimed at Mrs Thatcher during the mid to late 1970s
Not great headlines
Turns out both his parents ran for office too, in the 1980s
Farage has more charm and charisma than both but he has the opposite problem in that he is often too laid back and not serious enough, although also a control freak like they are
Perhaps it’s better for us to be led by people who are awkwardly abrasive. We need to wake up.
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Having now declared that both Lammy and Reeves are in post for the rest of this Parliament, he's going to be asked this about every senior minister, in due course.
Which will considerably raise the stakes on his first major reshuffle.
I don’t mean they will lose the next GE, I mean they could easily disappear as a party of government. Because what then is the point of them?
@williamglenn gets a lot of stick for his analysis that the next election could be between Tories and Reform but in this light it makes sense
Reform will be the working class socially conservative patriotic zero migration right wing and the Tories will be the centrist Christian democrats for the middle classes
The Lib Dems will take the rich and the bitter Remainers, greens will get the greens
SNP will extinguish Labour in Scotland again and the Muslim party will start to take the Muslim vote
That leaves Labour with train drivers and maybe a dog in Yorkshire that inexplicably has suffrage
Virtually all senior politicians have that "dangerous delusion".
It worked for Blair for ten years, albeit aided by a fawning press, and indeed just got Keir Starmer into Downing Street, despite his lack of any convincing policies or competence or judgement.
Cummings, Cameron and Michael Gove are striking examples on the other side.
The question is, how long it takes before the voters rumble you.
The right wing press going off on one is priced in. I think you might have forgotten what they do during Labour governments. It has been a while.
"Spain plans 100% tax for homes bought by non-EU residents - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr7enzjrymxo
OH
Hard times for the left across the West. The Vibeshiff is accelerating
The obvious question from that useless BBC article is 100% of what?
1. Major tax rises which will drive the economy even faster into the wall, guaranteeing recession throughout their term, pretty much - and ensuring calamitous defeat in 2028
Or
2. “Ruthless spending cuts” which might stabilise the economy but which will enrage their remaining voters and their union donors and their media cheerleaders - ensuring calamitous defeat in 2028
They are third.
He was right about that and Team "Mommala" were all at sea.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/lloyds-bankers-could-face-bonus-cuts-unless-they-turn-up-to-office-at-least-two-days-a-week/ar-BB1rm0BI?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=1b96d444bc454636a1ed1fe07f345ff4&ei=17
Allegedly RFK jnr is against seed oils as well as vax, which sets him against agri-business. Got to be value in who and how many are gone in 2025.
It is also the abandonment of several decades of liberal multicultural pro immigration group think which has so long dominated our discourse, and grievously damaged Europe and, to a lesser extent, the USA
eg who would now confidently bet against President Mme Le Pen?
As Tony Blair pointed out, without some red meat for the core (hunting, say) politics is just arguing about spending or not spending 5% of GDP.
While politicians try to live in managerial mode, they don’t have skills or the power to reform the system. Where I work, we are managing the replacement of the back office for the bank, piece by piece. The result is faster, better, cheaper. It will save quite a lot of money.
Just take in one area - compliance. How can you save of compliance? We’ll, if the system is properly documented, does all kind of internal reconciliation automatically, and chucks out all the required reports and stats at a touch of a button, the bank’s side of auditing etc becomes really easy. Instead of a whole department wrestling with stacks of paper.
Government doesn’t have the skills for this, generally. Which means that over time, the natural accretion of process will cause things to stop.
We live in an age where many projects are rejected at concept stage, because the regulatory pain of getting them started I so great. Anything that takes more than 5 years to show results is politically nearly impossible.
So all the traditional parties can offer is the same. But it will cost more, each year, ahead of inflation.
The voters aren’t impressed by that.
(Good morning everyone.)
(Good morning everyone.)
In today's technofeudalism news, I wonder about this new story about Musk buying Tiktok.
This Government’s fatal flaw is not its socialist radicalism, but its devotion to bankrupt economic orthodoxy
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/13/reeves-duped-by-the-very-establishment-she-champions/ (£££)
This should have been the header. Reeves is a Treasury technocrat, like Osborne implementing Treasury (and OBR orthodoxy) which (a) does not work and (b) is being undermined by the Bank of England.
Good morning, everybody.
That is the black swan just over the event horizon: for everyone and everything. And all forecasts and predictions must be seen in that context
It is not only going to deter non EU residents buying but it will poleaxe those homes resale value
Mind you, second home ownership is coming under fire not only here in Wales, but in othe parts of the UK with upto 300% council taxes and that is payable every year
I found some. Hope not Hate polled 4000 Reform voters back August 2024 to find out what makes them tick, and it is analysed on pages 28-32 of this report aimed at understanding Reform UK - imo the rest is worth a read too. As usual, Nick Lowles expresses some opinion from a progressive viewpoint, but in the context of useful research / commentary.
https://hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/HOPE-not-hate-reform-uk-what-you-need-to-know-2024.pdf
Here's a clip on enthusiasm for Tommy Robinson:
Meantime I worry for the right aligning too closely with Putin. Not good for the U.K or the world.
Tut.
It will swing back.
The Senate Republicans aren't going to turn down very many, if any, of Trump's basket of deplorables.
And there are more dangerous nominees than Kennedy
Will be very interesting to see if, something happened to Trump, and Vance takes over if he could break free of MAGA and be his own man.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/13/jd-vance-trump-fox-january-6
It’ll put off a few rich Americans, some Russians, and a few Brits.
Edit: pretty pic of palm trees in snow.
https://www.facebook.com/VisitBute/posts/pfbid0btq7CQWo6iMKuMt93yabQKGLrLQU56VS46ktT4ptbEvAxFv6qCUK2HZZ8Y2Zk1Uwl?locale=sl_SI
By far the worst Kemi thing isn't any personality traits though, it's the policy drought.
They need to mix it up a bit. Increase the average budget for a start so people are spending 200k plus, get more people who are interested in buying actual proper houses with gardens, and move beyond Almeria, Murcia, the Algarve and Charente.
For the want of a better word “progressive” politics have been in the ascendant in the west for maybe half a century or more. Of course this is a huge generalisation with many caveats and exceptions but it is nonetheless true
This pendulum is now swinging - finally - in the other direction - and this will presumably be another decades long process and we will see some kind of peak radical right supremacy in about 2050-60
But again there will be many exceptions and anomalies
In the run up to 2008 we grossly and recklessly operated a defunct regulatory scheme devised by G Brown esq. That system required masses of form filling to keep bureaucrats gainfully employed but essentially ignored structural risk. The reckless lending this tolerated allowed our economy to grow a bit faster than most of our peers but meant that when the crash came we were far more exposed than any other medium sized country.
The consequences of this meant we were left with a massive structural deficit based upon spending both on and off the books that needed to be addressed. Osborne did this quite successfully reducing the deficit gradually avoiding any recession of note.
By the time Osborne left things were getting back to some sort of normal, albeit there was a major backlog of work that had been deferred. Since then we have had the disaster of Covid, the major slowdown of China, the invasion of Ukraine, the sanctions of Russia with the consequential explosion in gas prices and inflation.
An economy that had not fully recovered from the collapse of 2008 has struggled to cope with this wave of problems and challenges. The idea we could somehow avoid the consequences of 2008 and the subsequent issues is just another fantasy.
The flaw with Osborne's 'long term economic plan' was that, while sticking to discipline on current spending, he should not have cut investment.
Indeed he ought to have borrowed more for that.
"As me" is also grammatically correct, since it's an abbreviated version of "as compared with me".
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/jan/14/norwich-restaurant-charges-100-for-hawaiian-pineapple-pizza
Just like every other pm.
https://x.com/TalkTV/status/1879068943542825413
Or to adjust Cameron’s fixing the roof metaphor, you should take out a loan to fix the roof, festoon it with photovoltaics, install double glazing, build a granny annex and put a studio on the garden while the borrowing rate is nearly zero.
It's not as though he will be able to ban vaccines - or that there isn't a very large cohort of Americans who already refuse vaccination.
He's a dismal appointment, but others are potentially worse. And morally to alarm some Senate Republicans.
'Don't mention the war.'
'But they started it!'