The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Who could have guessed that an austerity policy of not fixing the roads, allowing waiting lists to climb, taking money out of public servants pockets or cancelling investment would not lead to long term economic growth? 🤷
Austerity can buy you time in the short term to balance the books, but you’re still on a downward trajectory.
If the Labour government does cut services while increasing taxes does put the lie to the suggestion that there was no fiscal gap. Unless we think Rachel Reeves created the gap all on her own in six months.
Reader: the fiscal gap was a lot, lot bigger than £22 billion.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I don't think it matters much how modest or not Kemi is at the moment. Mostly no-one is listening to the Tories, who have nothing interesting to say anyway. We are not in a phase where policy can consist of attacks on the other lot. Those who listen at all to grown up politics are listening for solutions, competence, trust and integrity.
As both Con and Lab are polling figures indicating that they are both down to their irremovable base it looks as if some people have decided that the nearest thing to what they want is Reform.
This ought to be a fantastic chance for the LDs to tell us what their platform for sunlit uplands might be.
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
There are infrastructure projects we are doing now which were mooted/cut during Osbornes time. Back then we could borrow much cheaper than now, and we would have had them finished by now, so would have longer to reap the rewards.
It was pretty obvious back then. It's blatantly so now.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Back in 2010, wehad that headroom, though. Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise. And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
I don't think it matters much how modest or not Kemi is at the moment. Mostly no-one is listening to the Tories, who have nothing interesting to say anyway. We are not in a phase where policy can consist of attacks on the other lot. Those who listen at all to grown up politics are listening for solutions, competence, trust and integrity.
As both Con and Lab are polling figures indicating that they are both down to their irremovable base it looks as if some people have decided that the nearest thing to what they want is Reform.
This ought to be a fantastic chance for the LDs to tell us what their platform for sunlit uplands might be.
Paragliding to the sunlit uplands presumably. Thankfully for the LDs Lembit Opik is no longer connected to them and therefore not available to physically enact the metaphor.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
I know the Thatcher household analogy is overused and incorrect, but at household level if interest rates are near zero you borrow to invest in almost anything giving a positive return; if they are 5 or 6% you think very carefully about what kind of investment will deliver that kind of ROI.
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.
That's all well and good if you've a plan to pay off the debt at some point.
If your plan (as has been the plan of every chancellor since Ken Clarke) is to just add the borrowing to the national debt (it's free right, almost 0% interest!), all this means is that when interest rates return to normal you suddenly have to make massive cuts in spending, because suddenly you've a massive annual debt interest bill coming down the tracks at you.
Useless as she is, Reeves's current plight is only partly her fault; she's also reaping the rewards of 25 years worth of "borrowing to invest" started by Gordon Brown.
Unfortunately the proper fix for it (cutting spending to living within our means) is going to be terribly unpopular!
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
UK has c.30m housing units for a population of c.67m people France has c.38m housing units for a population of c.66m people
The UK is around EIGHT MILLION houses short of France, for the same population to within a margin of error.
That’s the scale of the housing shortage. You can easily build a couple of million new houses without much happening to prices either, because there’s so much pent-up demand and overcrowding in the market. How many 30-year-olds used to live with their parents before 2000, for example? For the vast majority of those in that situation, it isn’t by choice.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
Isn't there quite a high degree of landlordism though? Interestingly afaics Ireland and Germany who with the UK tend towards the bottom of the European second home charts also have have high landlordism.
Im delighted to see youre sharing your tips on how to be modest
My new year's resolution is to be less conceited, my friends and colleagues wondered if I could achieve it but I told them not to worry, it would be easy for somebody as brilliant as me.
"...as I"
Tut.
Pedantry. "As me" is also grammatically correct, since it's an abbreviated version of "as compared with me".
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
The UK base rate was 0.5% throughout the period of the coalition government, wasn't it ?
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
I know the Thatcher household analogy is overused and incorrect, but at household level if interest rates are near zero you borrow to invest in almost anything giving a positive return; if they are 5 or 6% you think very carefully about what kind of investment will deliver that kind of ROI.
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.
That's all well and good if you've a plan to pay off the debt at some point.
If your plan (as has been the plan of every chancellor since Ken Clarke) is to just add the borrowing to the national debt (it's free right, almost 0% interest!), all this means is that when interest rates return to normal you suddenly have to make massive cuts in spending, because suddenly you've a massive annual debt interest bill coming down the tracks at you.
Useless as she is, Reeves's current plight is only partly her fault; she's also reaping the rewards of 25 years worth of "borrowing to invest" started by Gordon Brown.
Unfortunately the proper fix for it (cutting spending to living within our means) is going to be terribly unpopular!
If you had borrowed more, using long term debt, to fund productive assets, when rates were rock bottom, they would easily have paid for themselves, though. See, for example, tidal power.
At current interest rates, the case is much less compelling.
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, you have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Perhaps you should embed with one of the insurgent groups, I'm sure they'd let you tap away to the outside world to your heart's content. There may be downsides though..
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Back in 2010, wehad that headroom, though. Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise. And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
We had a massive deficit and, thanks to other events, we still do. I don’t accept that we could have spent more. We should have invested more but that required even sharper cuts in current spending. And that would have stress tested the Coalition to destruction.
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
Letting RBS go would have opened a Pandora's Box of chaos and a domino effect that would be difficult to control.
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, you have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Perhaps you should embed with one of the insurgent groups, I'm sure they'd let you tap away to the outside world to your heart's content. There may be downsides though..
I have wondered about this. Presumably in the Shan State or Rohingya or Arrakan or the Karen Enclave etc etc they do NOT have this internet throttling. So all I have to do is defect. And I’ve got at least 40 rebel groups to choose from
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
I know the Thatcher household analogy is overused and incorrect, but at household level if interest rates are near zero you borrow to invest in almost anything giving a positive return; if they are 5 or 6% you think very carefully about what kind of investment will deliver that kind of ROI.
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.
That's all well and good if you've a plan to pay off the debt at some point.
If your plan (as has been the plan of every chancellor since Ken Clarke) is to just add the borrowing to the national debt (it's free right, almost 0% interest!), all this means is that when interest rates return to normal you suddenly have to make massive cuts in spending, because suddenly you've a massive annual debt interest bill coming down the tracks at you.
Useless as she is, Reeves's current plight is only partly her fault; she's also reaping the rewards of 25 years worth of "borrowing to invest" started by Gordon Brown.
Unfortunately the proper fix for it (cutting spending to living within our means) is going to be terribly unpopular!
If you had borrowed more, using long term debt, to fund productive assets, when rates were rock bottom, they would easily have paid for themselves, though. See, for example, tidal power.
At current interest rates, the case is much less compelling.
How much would the planning process cost on those investments?
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Yeah. I am acutely aware, which is why I’ve posted about a third of the nonsense posts that you have and am working on getting it down. What a waste!
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
I know the Thatcher household analogy is overused and incorrect, but at household level if interest rates are near zero you borrow to invest in almost anything giving a positive return; if they are 5 or 6% you think very carefully about what kind of investment will deliver that kind of ROI.
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.
That's all well and good if you've a plan to pay off the debt at some point.
If your plan (as has been the plan of every chancellor since Ken Clarke) is to just add the borrowing to the national debt (it's free right, almost 0% interest!), all this means is that when interest rates return to normal you suddenly have to make massive cuts in spending, because suddenly you've a massive annual debt interest bill coming down the tracks at you.
Useless as she is, Reeves's current plight is only partly her fault; she's also reaping the rewards of 25 years worth of "borrowing to invest" started by Gordon Brown.
Unfortunately the proper fix for it (cutting spending to living within our means) is going to be terribly unpopular!
If you had borrowed more, using long term debt, to fund productive assets, when rates were rock bottom, they would easily have paid for themselves, though. See, for example, tidal power.
At current interest rates, the case is much less compelling.
It’s a fair argument that by about 2013-4, with the immediate crisis over and the public finances heading in the right direction, some long-dated bonds to fund genuine infrastructure projects would not have gone amiss. We could have had tidal power, nuclear power, HS2, and LHR3 all up and running by now.
Im delighted to see youre sharing your tips on how to be modest
My new year's resolution is to be less conceited, my friends and colleagues wondered if I could achieve it but I told them not to worry, it would be easy for somebody as brilliant as me.
"...as I"
Tut.
Pedantry. "As me" is also grammatically correct, since it's an abbreviated version of "as compared with me".
In "as brilliant as me" "as" is a preposition so "as me" is correct. If you wanted to use "as" as a conjunction here it would be better to say "as brilliant as I am", though in this context "as brilliant as me" is better.
I don't think anyone in their right minds would say "You aren't as good as she."
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
Letting RBS go would have opened a Pandora's Box of chaos and a domino effect that would be difficult to control.
Besides which I had cash at NatWest.
Yes we had no choice other than to do what we did and Darling did well in a tricky situation. But we should not have been in that situation.
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Yeah. I am acutely aware, which is why I’ve posted about a third of the nonsense posts that you have and am working on getting it down. What a waste!
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
Ah yes. I have the same feeling. If I ever want to get depressed about my wasted life I look at the literal number of comments I have made on PB and j work out how many waking hours, days, weeks they constitute, especially as a proportion of my entire lifespan
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Don’t forget that a lot of these “second homes” are large shacks on old family pasture land with a hand pump well and gas bottles or a generator.
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
I am hoping to kick the habit before 30,000 posts (since 2017). I suspect it's a little like giving up fags, you keep coming back for just one more.
Jonathan is on a miserly 21,000 posts since 2013. Your 57,000 posts since COVID however is weapons grade posting. I wonder if you totted up all your various identities since 2013 you wouldn't leave HYUFD's impressive current total in the dust.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Back in 2010, wehad that headroom, though. Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise. And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
We had a massive deficit and, thanks to other events, we still do. I don’t accept that we could have spent more. We should have invested more but that required even sharper cuts in current spending. And that would have stress tested the Coalition to destruction.
Or higher taxes. The electorate needs to be given a simple choice - either we spend less or we tax more. The jokers who pretend that we can magically cut half the government budget while also improving services are just deluding themselves or lying.
This applies equally to things like the pay increases for the NHS, the “tractor tax”, and social care.
We are utterly rudderless and to pretend any of the main parties (including Reform) have any sort of viable or coherent plan for the future is laughable. We are the Old Trafford roof.
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Yeah. I am acutely aware, which is why I’ve posted about a third of the nonsense posts that you have and am working on getting it down. What a waste!
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
Ah yes. I have the same feeling. If I ever want to get depressed about my wasted life I look at the literal number of comments I have made on PB and j work out how many waking hours, days, weeks they constitute, especially as a proportion of my entire lifespan
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Don’t forget that a lot of these “second homes” are large shacks on old family pasture land with a hand pump well and gas bottles or a generator.
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
I get the impression they were living in the countryside until the Soviets built them an apartment in the town.
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
Letting RBS go would have opened a Pandora's Box of chaos and a domino effect that would be difficult to control.
Besides which I had cash at NatWest.
Yes we had no choice other than to do what we did and Darling did well in a tricky situation. But we should not have been in that situation.
If Bush had intervened in Lehman Brothers maybe the landing wouldn't have been so hard.
Speaking of Internet addiction look at this photo I took on the streets of Rangoon a couple of days ago. I took it to illustrate to myself the melancholy decay of British imperial architecture but actually it’s more interesting as an illustration of smartphone addiction
These are street hawkers in a poor country mired in a terrible civil war. They need all the money and custom they can get, so they need eyes and ears alert to attract bypassers
Instead more than half of them are locked onto their smartphones
Imagine if someone had predicted this in 1980 or 1990. “In thirty years time everyone will spend most of their conscious lives staring diagonally downwards at a smallish metal and glass oblong and we will all think this is totally normal”
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Yeah. I am acutely aware, which is why I’ve posted about a third of the nonsense posts that you have and am working on getting it down. What a waste!
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
Ah yes. I have the same feeling. If I ever want to get depressed about my wasted life I look at the literal number of comments I have made on PB and j work out how many waking hours, days, weeks they constitute, especially as a proportion of my entire lifespan
🤒😶😶
I could have been a contender, I could have been somebody...
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
I am hoping to kick the habit before 30,000 posts (since 2017). I suspect it's a little like giving up fags, you keep coming back for just one more.
Jonathan is on a miserly 21,000 posts since 2013. Your 57,000 posts since COVID however is weapons grade posting. I wonder if you totted up all your various identities since 2013 you wouldn't leave HYUFD's impressive current total in the dust.
Yes it is genuinely shocking and, like @Jonathan, I honestly prefer not to think about it
Maybe this is why I get banned so often. I do it deliberately as it’s my only way of doing cold turkey. Forcibly. I remember when I was in prison as a young man - one day they gave me a new cell mate - an alcoholic who went cold turkey as soon as he arrived. He fell asleep for about 4 days - muttering and shaking - I thought he was a lunatic. Or going to die. Then he woke up and coughed and said hello and he turned out to be a nice guy. A Scottish alcoholic fond of Bucky
He admitted to me that he would get himself arrested and jailed precisely because it was his one way of drying out. He reckoned these enforced periods of sobriety in prison had probably saved his life
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
Letting RBS go would have opened a Pandora's Box of chaos and a domino effect that would be difficult to control.
Besides which I had cash at NatWest.
Yes we had no choice other than to do what we did and Darling did well in a tricky situation. But we should not have been in that situation.
If Bush had intervened in Lehman Brothers maybe the landing wouldn't have been so hard.
Not at that moment in time but there would have been other triggers. We ( as in the whole of the west )were massively over borrowed and had sustained demand with debt for far too long.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Back in 2010, wehad that headroom, though. Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise. And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
We had a massive deficit and, thanks to other events, we still do. I don’t accept that we could have spent more. We should have invested more but that required even sharper cuts in current spending. And that would have stress tested the Coalition to destruction.
Or higher taxes. The electorate needs to be given a simple choice - either we spend less or we tax more. The jokers who pretend that we can magically cut half the government budget while also improving services are just deluding themselves or lying.
This applies equally to things like the pay increases for the NHS, the “tractor tax”, and social care.
We are utterly rudderless and to pretend any of the main parties (including Reform) have any sort of viable or coherent plan for the future is laughable. We are the Old Trafford roof.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
I know the Thatcher household analogy is overused and incorrect, but at household level if interest rates are near zero you borrow to invest in almost anything giving a positive return; if they are 5 or 6% you think very carefully about what kind of investment will deliver that kind of ROI.
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.
That's all well and good if you've a plan to pay off the debt at some point.
If your plan (as has been the plan of every chancellor since Ken Clarke) is to just add the borrowing to the national debt (it's free right, almost 0% interest!), all this means is that when interest rates return to normal you suddenly have to make massive cuts in spending, because suddenly you've a massive annual debt interest bill coming down the tracks at you.
Useless as she is, Reeves's current plight is only partly her fault; she's also reaping the rewards of 25 years worth of "borrowing to invest" started by Gordon Brown.
Unfortunately the proper fix for it (cutting spending to living within our means) is going to be terribly unpopular!
If you had borrowed more, using long term debt, to fund productive assets, when rates were rock bottom, they would easily have paid for themselves, though. See, for example, tidal power.
At current interest rates, the case is much less compelling.
How much would the planning process cost on those investments?
I have some sympathy for Badenoch. In this country some people (eg white male ex public schoolboys) are allowed to possess phenomenal levels of unwarranted self-belief, while the rest of us are forced to either deploy various self-effacement strategies to avoid accusations of being uppity, or surrender to self-doubt and imposter syndrome. So yes, she may be arrogant and have an inflated sense of her own ability, but no more so than Cameron or Johnson.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
The Brexit benefits are piling up. The obvious question from that useless BBC article is 100% of what?
It’s setting the property transfer tax at (up to) 100%. If you buy a property that costs £500,000, you pay £500,000 in tax on top.
"A Place in the Sun" could be on borrowed time.
Seems crazy idea given you are only getting people with money into your system ,they get nothing free, have to pay for all public services and contribute to the economy. The exact opposite of the immigrants the UK gets.
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Yeah. I am acutely aware, which is why I’ve posted about a third of the nonsense posts that you have and am working on getting it down. What a waste!
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
Ah yes. I have the same feeling. If I ever want to get depressed about my wasted life I look at the literal number of comments I have made on PB and j work out how many waking hours, days, weeks they constitute, especially as a proportion of my entire lifespan
🤒😶😶
I could have been a contender, I could have been somebody...
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
Yes, one of several councils whose funding problems, or certainly the majority of them, is due to their total mismanagement. It is cross party too. Not a party political issue. Birmingham, Nottingham, Thurrock, there are several.
It is a bitter pill to swallow for people in the other Surrey council areas if they get merged and they end up on the hook for Woking's debt. Especially when they have had no say in the restructuring it has just been imposed on them.
And nor should they be. Presidents are inaugurated around the world all the time. It's nothing special. Countries have ambassadors abroad for that kind of thing.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Don’t forget that a lot of these “second homes” are large shacks on old family pasture land with a hand pump well and gas bottles or a generator.
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
still a lot better than this dump , a shack here would be out of most people's reach
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
They'll be banning birthday cakes for politicians during a pandemic next.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Back in 2010, wehad that headroom, though. Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise. And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
We had a massive deficit and, thanks to other events, we still do. I don’t accept that we could have spent more. We should have invested more but that required even sharper cuts in current spending. And that would have stress tested the Coalition to destruction.
Or higher taxes. The electorate needs to be given a simple choice - either we spend less or we tax more. The jokers who pretend that we can magically cut half the government budget while also improving services are just deluding themselves or lying.
This applies equally to things like the pay increases for the NHS, the “tractor tax”, and social care.
We are utterly rudderless and to pretend any of the main parties (including Reform) have any sort of viable or coherent plan for the future is laughable. We are the Old Trafford roof.
Or expand the economy. Liz Truss was right about that at least.
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
Letting RBS go would have opened a Pandora's Box of chaos and a domino effect that would be difficult to control.
Besides which I had cash at NatWest.
Yes we had no choice other than to do what we did and Darling did well in a tricky situation. But we should not have been in that situation.
If Bush had intervened in Lehman Brothers maybe the landing wouldn't have been so hard.
Not at that moment in time but there would have been other triggers. We ( as in the whole of the west )were massively over borrowed and had sustained demand with debt for far too long.
But isn't that how the world goes around? We pay a premium to use other people's money to buy nice things, most of which we don't need. But that's how capitalism works. There would be no growth without consumers buying tat they don't need.
We were all better off living in council houses (not that I ever lived in one, but you know what I mean) free from tat and using public transport.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
The right wing press attacks Labour leadership, not exactly newsworthy.
The Guardian - right wing?
"Starmer backs Reeves and warns of "ruthless" public spending cuts"
Surely those who are right of centre will be cheering at the prospect of spending cuts?
Yes but I am more loving the fact that after been told for fourteen years that austerity was a choice that actually it is an economic reality.
That's the thing, it was a choice; now it's a necessity.
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.
We have had 2 attempts to expand the envelope of spending, one by Truss and one by Reeves. Both of these caused significant rises in our long term interest rates, substantially increasing the cost of our debt burden and offsetting any boost in growth that additional spending might have caused.
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Back in 2010, wehad that headroom, though. Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise. And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
We had a massive deficit and, thanks to other events, we still do. I don’t accept that we could have spent more. We should have invested more but that required even sharper cuts in current spending. And that would have stress tested the Coalition to destruction.
Or higher taxes. The electorate needs to be given a simple choice - either we spend less or we tax more. The jokers who pretend that we can magically cut half the government budget while also improving services are just deluding themselves or lying.
This applies equally to things like the pay increases for the NHS, the “tractor tax”, and social care.
We are utterly rudderless and to pretend any of the main parties (including Reform) have any sort of viable or coherent plan for the future is laughable. We are the Old Trafford roof.
Only works if we bring in flat income taxes.
Otherwise you, me, and many other PB posters, end up paying for those not in gainful employment.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
They'll be banning birthday cakes for politicians during a pandemic next.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
That is not the reason
It is their campaign against obesity
No MRM fritters*, either. Which puts it in a very different context from the one you so rushed to imply.
*Like the ones so famously not beloved of Jamie Oliver.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Don’t forget that a lot of these “second homes” are large shacks on old family pasture land with a hand pump well and gas bottles or a generator.
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
still a lot better than this dump , a shack here would be out of most people's reach
Quite a few people seem to have holiday 'caravans' on sites. Which, incidentally, do very little for the local economies from what I've seen.
Brighter again this morning. Here, anyway, and now; forecast is for thick cloud.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
That is what happens to profligate Labour authorities 😆
A Daily Telegraph reader with no student debt and earning £130,000 a year is salary sacrificing so much into their pension that they take home only £2,100 a month. So it is lucky they have free meals and coffee at work!
But once we've dried our tears, consider what this means. The increasingly common combination of salary sacrifice and high pension contributions mean that high-earners cut their income tax bills, remain eligible for benefits, especially around childcare, and on top of that get higher rate tax relief on those pension contributions.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
That is not the reason
It is their campaign against obesity
That again seems laudable.
If kids are fat it’s not because of birthday cake at nursery though, is it?
The problem is the parents feeding them junk for the other six days a week.
So the solution shouldn’t be a ‘ministry of fun’ shutting down birthday parties, it should be better parental education and promotion of healthy foods.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
UK has c.30m housing units for a population of c.67m people France has c.38m housing units for a population of c.66m people
The UK is around EIGHT MILLION houses short of France, for the same population to within a margin of error.
That’s the scale of the housing shortage. You can easily build a couple of million new houses without much happening to prices either, because there’s so much pent-up demand and overcrowding in the market. How many 30-year-olds used to live with their parents before 2000, for example? For the vast majority of those in that situation, it isn’t by choice.
Yet France's overcrowding rate is 10x higher than the UK.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Don’t forget that a lot of these “second homes” are large shacks on old family pasture land with a hand pump well and gas bottles or a generator.
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
still a lot better than this dump , a shack here would be out of most people's reach
Planning is a devolved matter. Feel free to let me buy a plot of cheap in the highlands and build a shack.
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.
I don’t agree that economic orthodoxy doesn’t work.
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.
Government finances have never really recovered from the 2008 shock, and the 2020 pandemic on top only made things worse just as they were starting to look better.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
That is true but as I said we were a lot more exposed to 2008 than anyone else. A clear example is that we had the largest bank in the world that threatened, at one point, to add another £1trn of liabilities onto our balance sheet. UK plc is simply not big enough to be a lender of last resort for such behemoths.
Letting RBS go would have opened a Pandora's Box of chaos and a domino effect that would be difficult to control.
Besides which I had cash at NatWest.
Yes we had no choice other than to do what we did and Darling did well in a tricky situation. But we should not have been in that situation.
If Bush had intervened in Lehman Brothers maybe the landing wouldn't have been so hard.
Not at that moment in time but there would have been other triggers. We ( as in the whole of the west )were massively over borrowed and had sustained demand with debt for far too long.
But isn't that how the world goes around? We pay a premium to use other people's money to buy nice things, most of which we don't need. But that's how capitalism works. There would be no growth without consumers buying tat they don't need.
We were all better off living in council houses (not that I ever lived in one, but you know what I mean) free from tat and using public transport.
There's nothing stopping you riding the bus, buying a cheap ex-council house, tearing out anything not commonly owned until after 1961 and trying to sell it to others as some kind of Amish-Attlee-ism.
I'm interested n how much longer GB News has to run.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
Ah the voice of British liberal democracy. Ban the news you don’t like. Only nice people with approved left wing BBC opinions should be allowed on screen
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
100% not necessary but in the UK the non resident surcharge is just 2%. Bump it up to 10%-15% asap.
In a country starved of houses, it does feel that second homes and vacant investment lock up and leave properties are luxuries the nation cannot afford.
The occupancy rate in the U.K. is extremely high, in general. It’s one of the indicators of the scale of the shortage of housing
Yes, the lack of a high degree of second home ownership is a sign of market failure. Healthy stable property markets have much higher levels of vacant property and far more second homes.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
I’m always struck by this when I travel around mainland Europe. How it’s perfectly normal for many people to have a second home in the country. Even somewhere dirt poor like Moldova
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
Don’t forget that a lot of these “second homes” are large shacks on old family pasture land with a hand pump well and gas bottles or a generator.
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
still a lot better than this dump , a shack here would be out of most people's reach
Don't be so hard on Scotland. I even quite like Killie.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
That is not the reason
It is their campaign against obesity
That again seems laudable.
If kids are fat it’s not because of birthday cake at nursery though, is it?
The problem is the parents feeding them junk for the other six days a week.
So the solution shouldn’t be a ‘ministry of fun’ shutting down birthday parties, it should be better parental education and promotion of healthy foods.
That's part of the problem. A larger one IMV, looking at my son and his friends, is lack of exercise. It's just far too easy to spend the entire day outside school staring at screens.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
Ray Morgan went into hiding, apparently.
It was massive property speculation by the conservative run council without any consideration of the financial risk or the likelihood of Woking becoming a new docklands, when more attractive established towns such as Guildford had seen companies leave.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
That is not the reason
It is their campaign against obesity
Who'd be a political leader, eh? "Let them eat cake" didn't go down well, and now apparently "don't let them eat cake" is off-limits too. Johnson got accused of "cakeism" and poor old Rishi Sunak got a police caution for eating cake.
A Daily Telegraph reader with no student debt and earning £130,000 a year is salary sacrificing so much into their pension that they take home only £2,100 a month. So it is lucky they have free meals and coffee at work!
But once we've dried our tears, consider what this means. The increasingly common combination of salary sacrifice and high pension contributions mean that high-earners cut their income tax bills, remain eligible for benefits, especially around childcare, and on top of that get higher rate tax relief on those pension contributions.
It is absurd.
That’s silly behaviour, he’s obviously trying to get his income under the 40% tax rate, but if he can live on £2k a month in London then fair play I suppose.
There’s a growing number of people living like this though, especially in the US, who aim to retire at 40 with a couple of million in investments and live off the interest.
I'm interested n how much longer GB News has to run.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
Ah the voice of British liberal democracy. Ban the news you don’t like. Only nice people with approved left wing BBC opinions should be allowed on screen
Fuck off
What did you make of Truss's claim that we need to "fix the media"?
A Daily Telegraph reader with no student debt and earning £130,000 a year is salary sacrificing so much into their pension that they take home only £2,100 a month. So it is lucky they have free meals and coffee at work!
But once we've dried our tears, consider what this means. The increasingly common combination of salary sacrifice and high pension contributions mean that high-earners cut their income tax bills, remain eligible for benefits, especially around childcare, and on top of that get higher rate tax relief on those pension contributions.
It is absurd.
That’s silly behaviour, he’s obviously trying to get his income under the 40% tax rate, but if he can live on £2k a month in London then fair play I suppose.
There’s a growing number of people living like this though, especially in the US, who aim to retire at 40 with a couple of million in investments and live off the interest.
I'm interested n how much longer GB News has to run.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
Ah the voice of British liberal democracy. Ban the news you don’t like. Only nice people with approved left wing BBC opinions should be allowed on screen
Fuck off
Got out of bed the wrong side, this morning? I haven't suggested banning anything.
There's a regulatory setup around balance of reporting. If they follow that they have no problems. If you listen to it you'll know it's an opinion channel not a news channel.
It's like speeding in you motor - it's dead easy not to get speeding fines.
A Daily Telegraph reader with no student debt and earning £130,000 a year is salary sacrificing so much into their pension that they take home only £2,100 a month. So it is lucky they have free meals and coffee at work!
But once we've dried our tears, consider what this means. The increasingly common combination of salary sacrifice and high pension contributions mean that high-earners cut their income tax bills, remain eligible for benefits, especially around childcare, and on top of that get higher rate tax relief on those pension contributions.
It is absurd.
That’s silly behaviour, he’s obviously trying to get his income under the 40% tax rate, but if he can live on £2k a month in London then fair play I suppose.
There’s a growing number of people living like this though, especially in the US, who aim to retire at 40 with a couple of million in investments and live off the interest.
I'm interested n how much longer GB News has to run.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
Ah the voice of British liberal democracy. Ban the news you don’t like. Only nice people with approved left wing BBC opinions should be allowed on screen
Fuck off
What did you make of Truss's claim that we need to "fix the media"?
Musk buying Tiktok and the BBC, that sort of stuff.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
That is not the reason
It is their campaign against obesity
That again seems laudable.
Banning things is almost never laudable. Personal responsibility matters, as does an understanding of moderation.
Profligate councils in one of the wealthiest parts of the country expect the taxpayer to write off their debt as part of the re-organisation of local govt upcoming.
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
Ray Morgan went into hiding, apparently.
It was massive property speculation by the conservative run council without any consideration of the financial risk or the likelihood of Woking becoming a new docklands, when more attractive established towns such as Guildford had seen companies leave.
But interest rates were low so they were right to borrow to invest. Right? Right?!!!
A Daily Telegraph reader with no student debt and earning £130,000 a year is salary sacrificing so much into their pension that they take home only £2,100 a month. So it is lucky they have free meals and coffee at work!
But once we've dried our tears, consider what this means. The increasingly common combination of salary sacrifice and high pension contributions mean that high-earners cut their income tax bills, remain eligible for benefits, especially around childcare, and on top of that get higher rate tax relief on those pension contributions.
It is absurd.
That’s silly behaviour, he’s obviously trying to get his income under the 40% tax rate, but if he can live on £2k a month in London then fair play I suppose.
There’s a growing number of people living like this though, especially in the US, who aim to retire at 40 with a couple of million in investments and live off the interest.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
Lee Anderson's show does have a guest leftie, he or she being "Left In The Corner" (get it??!).
Here’s a test for the PB tech brainiacs. I am very keen to swerve the Burmese government’s vpn ban and access certain apps and sites
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Loads of options
Leave Burma Get Starlink Turn the Internet off and get a life Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
You realise that you are telling me to “turn off the internet and get a life” on an internet forum dedicated to niche political arguments on which you, these last years, have spent a not-insignificant amount of your adult life?
Yeah. I am acutely aware, which is why I’ve posted about a third of the nonsense posts that you have and am working on getting it down. What a waste!
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
Ah yes. I have the same feeling. If I ever want to get depressed about my wasted life I look at the literal number of comments I have made on PB and j work out how many waking hours, days, weeks they constitute, especially as a proportion of my entire lifespan
🤒😶😶
I could have been a contender, I could have been somebody...
If it wasn't for PB addiction.
My theory is that humans have an in-built amount of time they will spend on unproductive tasks. If it wasn't pb, it would be something else. Crosswords. Telly. Chats about telly. Computer games. If it wasn't for pb, we'd be doing another one of those. I am always in awe of people who don't do this sort of thing. My oldest daughter is one. Or rather, she does do unproductive tasks, but for a defined amount of time which she has set herself before moving back on to something productive. She is quite terrifyingly organised.
I worked out yesterday I have been a pb poster for 39% of my life.
There is probably a perfectly reasonable justification, for example nut allergies. Small children dying from anaphylactic shock is more joyless than missing out on a birthday cake.
That is not the reason
It is their campaign against obesity
That again seems laudable.
If kids are fat it’s not because of birthday cake at nursery though, is it?
The problem is the parents feeding them junk for the other six days a week.
So the solution shouldn’t be a ‘ministry of fun’ shutting down birthday parties, it should be better parental education and promotion of healthy foods.
That's part of the problem. A larger one IMV, looking at my son and his friends, is lack of exercise. It's just far too easy to spend the entire day outside school staring at screens.
The kids next door to me play football in their garden every single waking minute they are not at school or eating meals.
No other kids around here do that. You never hear them except in the very high summer.
The first set are from the Middle East and here for a couple of years as Dad has some kind of UK contract.
Comments
It perplexes me that people still think, despite this compelling evidence under 2 administrations, that the UK Treasury has the autonomy to spend more and borrow more without severe economic consequences.
We can no longer rely upon the generosity of strangers. Our actions have consequences and we need to accept that those consequences can cause serious damage. Osborne was not wrong to focus on our deficit reduction. He was right.
Austerity can buy you time in the short term to balance the books, but you’re still on a downward trajectory.
The challenge for the current government is vast.
Reader: the fiscal gap was a lot, lot bigger than £22 billion.
In Italy, Eastern Europe and much of Scandinavia it’s just a norm for a family to have a summer house.
As both Con and Lab are polling figures indicating that they are both down to their irremovable base it looks as if some people have decided that the nearest thing to what they want is Reform.
This ought to be a fantastic chance for the LDs to tell us what their platform for sunlit uplands might be.
Not just the UK either, the G7 nations all have the same problem.
It's blatantly so now.
The Greeks are the kings of this.
Do-able? How?
As far as I can see no foreign SIM cards or esims work in Burma. So you are reliant on heavily restricted local mobile networks. Or WiFi
I’m actually quite impressed at how effectively they have sealed off Burma in the ways they want, online
But can I beat the junta? How?
Debt to GDP and interest rates were significantly lower - and construction costs likewise.
And we know how much the delays in (eg) nuclear cost us.
It wasn't a bad government, but it could have done better.
The focus on spending wasn't wrong - but reducing investment absolutely was.
Thankfully for the LDs Lembit Opik is no longer connected to them and therefore not available to physically enact the metaphor.
If your plan (as has been the plan of every chancellor since Ken Clarke) is to just add the borrowing to the national debt (it's free right, almost 0% interest!), all this means is that when interest rates return to normal you suddenly have to make massive cuts in spending, because suddenly you've a massive annual debt interest bill coming down the tracks at you.
Useless as she is, Reeves's current plight is only partly her fault; she's also reaping the rewards of 25 years worth of "borrowing to invest" started by Gordon Brown.
Unfortunately the proper fix for it (cutting spending to living within our means) is going to be terribly unpopular!
Shepherd's warning.
Loads of options
Leave Burma
Get Starlink
Turn the Internet off and get a life
Do something nerdy by tunnelling internet connections
Recommend option 3
When I was there last summer I asked people how bad Covid was and they said it was BAD but they also said “thank god I was able to go to our summer house in the country”
These are people living on $5k a year
Part of it may just be weather. Nowhere in Britain has reliably good summer weather so what’s the point in owning a second home in the UK when you can fly abroad and have a holiday in proper sunshine? Note that Holland - with equally dismal weather - also has very low levels of 2nd home ownership
QTWTAIN
Why should the general taxpayer pay this ?
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/surrey-councillors-ask-ministers-to-write-off-woking-s-1bn-debt/ar-BB1ro85c?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=6a6bc21f77274083bbf621107b9f840d&ei=13
France has c.38m housing units for a population of c.66m people
The UK is around EIGHT MILLION houses short of France, for the same population to within a margin of error.
That’s the scale of the housing shortage. You can easily build a couple of million new houses without much happening to prices either, because there’s so much pent-up demand and overcrowding in the market. How many 30-year-olds used to live with their parents before 2000, for example? For the vast majority of those in that situation, it isn’t by choice.
See, for example, tidal power.
At current interest rates, the case is much less compelling.
Besides which I had cash at NatWest.
Is your presenter & production team really just unaware that no British PM in the history of the USA ever yet attended a presidential inauguration?
Was it "a massive stain on our history" in 2021, 2017, 2013, 2009, 2005, 2001, 1997, 1993, 1989, 1985, 1981, 1977 ..1953 .. too?!
https://x.com/sundersays/status/1879079967323230677
The internet is the modern world’s fags. We’re all addicted.
I don't think anyone in their right minds would say
"You aren't as good as she."
but you might want to say
"You aren't as good as she was in her prime."
🤒😶😶
Even a lot of the second homes Finnish and Swedish friends have in the mountains or lakes are effectively shacks.
It’s not all front line villas at puerto banus or a belle epoque mansion hugga-mugga with your favourite British advert camera man in Villefranche.
Jonathan is on a miserly 21,000 posts since 2013. Your 57,000 posts since COVID however is weapons grade posting. I wonder if you totted up all your various identities since 2013 you wouldn't leave HYUFD's impressive current total in the dust.
Could be several councils in this situation.
This applies equally to things like the pay increases for the NHS, the “tractor tax”, and social care.
We are utterly rudderless and to pretend any of the main parties (including Reform) have any sort of viable or coherent plan for the future is laughable. We are the Old Trafford roof.
These are street hawkers in a poor country mired in a terrible civil war. They need all the money and custom they can get, so they need eyes and ears alert to attract bypassers
Instead more than half of them are locked onto their smartphones
Imagine if someone had predicted this in 1980 or 1990. “In thirty years time everyone will spend most of their conscious lives staring diagonally downwards at a smallish metal and glass oblong and we will all think this is totally normal”
If it wasn't for PB addiction.
SNP to ban birthday cakes from nurseries
Why on earth would they be so idiotic ?
Completely joyless
Maybe this is why I get banned so often. I do it deliberately as it’s my only way of doing cold turkey.
Forcibly. I remember when I was in prison as a young man - one day they gave me a new cell mate - an alcoholic who went cold turkey as soon as he arrived. He fell asleep for about 4 days - muttering and shaking - I thought he was a lunatic. Or going to die. Then he woke up and coughed and said hello and he turned out to be a nice guy. A Scottish alcoholic fond of Bucky
He admitted to me that he would get himself arrested and jailed precisely because it was his one way of drying out. He reckoned these enforced periods of sobriety in prison had probably saved his life
We played a lot of cribbage after that
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-65712567
That’s 1980s-style rotten borough levels of mismanagement, for which the officials and councillors involved really need to be held personally accountable.
The exact opposite of the immigrants the UK gets.
It is a bitter pill to swallow for people in the other Surrey council areas if they get merged and they end up on the hook for Woking's debt. Especially when they have had no say in the restructuring it has just been imposed on them.
“Rachel Reeves told it would be ‘politically suicidal’ to impose further cuts as economy falters – UK politics live”
Admittedly this is John McDonell advising her, but nevertheless it is the Guardian headline right now
We were all better off living in council houses (not that I ever lived in one, but you know what I mean) free from tat and using public transport.
It is their campaign against obesity
Otherwise you, me, and many other PB posters, end up paying for those not in gainful employment.
*Like the ones so famously not beloved of Jamie Oliver.
One of the comments Lee Anderson has been making at the Reform UK Ltd regional Knees-Ups has been "We have GB News". Add in the various Ref UK politicos who have jobs there, and the lack of any real attempt at balance even by a cross-partisan policy, and it doesn't look good with Ofcom.
Brighter again this morning. Here, anyway, and now; forecast is for thick cloud.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/im-28-and-earn-130k-but-scrimp-pension-millionaire/ (£££)
A Daily Telegraph reader with no student debt and earning £130,000 a year is salary sacrificing so much into their pension that they take home only £2,100 a month. So it is lucky they have free meals and coffee at work!
But once we've dried our tears, consider what this means. The increasingly common combination of salary sacrifice and high pension contributions mean that high-earners cut their income tax bills, remain eligible for benefits, especially around childcare, and on top of that get higher rate tax relief on those pension contributions.
It is absurd.
The problem is the parents feeding them junk for the other six days a week.
So the solution shouldn’t be a ‘ministry of fun’ shutting down birthday parties, it should be better parental education and promotion of healthy foods.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/housing-overcrowding.html
Me? I like central heating and fridges.
Fuck off
There’s a growing number of people living like this though, especially in the US, who aim to retire at 40 with a couple of million in investments and live off the interest.
There's a regulatory setup around balance of reporting. If they follow that they have no problems. If you listen to it you'll know it's an opinion channel not a news channel.
It's like speeding in you motor - it's dead easy not to get speeding fines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u-ypeKoWWM
(15 minutes)
I am always in awe of people who don't do this sort of thing. My oldest daughter is one. Or rather, she does do unproductive tasks, but for a defined amount of time which she has set herself before moving back on to something productive. She is quite terrifyingly organised.
I worked out yesterday I have been a pb poster for 39% of my life.
IN YOUR FACE, OBSCURE MYANMAR GENERAL IN NAYPYIDAW
No other kids around here do that. You never hear them except in the very high summer.
The first set are from the Middle East and here for a couple of years as Dad has some kind of UK contract.