Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Question: would the UK economy be better off if the Sunak/Hunt team had been supervising the economy these past six months with their supposed "biased towards politics" schtick versus the Starmer/Reeves "bias towards government"?
Wouldn’t have made much difference. Possibly worse. Hunt would have faced reality too and would have had to rolled back policies designed to engineer an election bounce. I guess the right wing press might have been less hysterical.
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
Basic pension is going up by £470 a year in April, which is about £200 faster than inflation. (Last ripples of the inflation spike feeding into wages, mostly.)
This is a valuable new fortnightly slot in Ukraine the Latest, covering life in the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine.
To my ear, this first one overplays resistance attacks, and rather underplays the continuing attempts to extinguish Ukrainian culture with the methods and impacts, but it is very much worth the time to listen.
My competition entry. 1.Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 33%, Con – 29%, LD 16%, Reform 30%
2.Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 22%, Con – 17%, LD 10%, Reform 22%
3.Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025: 5
4.Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025: 0
5.Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025: 1
6.Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025: 2
7.Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election: 165
8.UK CPI figure for November 2025: 2.9%
9.UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025: £122bn
10. UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025: 2%
11.US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025: 2.2%
12.EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025: 1.4%
13.USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025: 130 USD/RUB
14.The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series: Australia 2-2 England
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Question: would the UK economy be better off if the Sunak/Hunt team had been supervising the economy these past six months with their supposed "biased towards politics" schtick versus the Starmer/Reeves "bias towards government"?
Wouldn’t have made much difference. Possibly worse. Hunt would have faced reality too and would have had to rolled back policies designed to engineer an election bounce. I guess the right wing press might have been less hysterical.
Which is precisely why we had an early election.
In theory the last day for a GE was 28/1/25 so we could still have a Tory government if they had wanted to go as long as they could, but having salted the earth and a giveaway budget they knew that it would be better to skip town than face reality.
And that is why, as an old-school conservative, I can't admire Sunak and Hunt, for all they started by clearing some of the mess their predecessors gave them.
Politically, they were doomed from day one. They were perfectly placed to do government-not-politics and fix some of the politically impossible problems the nation has. Not only did they flunk that, they made things worse with their NI cuts and joke spending plans.
Again with this bullshit about "NI cuts" that you know is not true.
They put taxes up not down by freezing the thresholds and raising NI which cushions the impact of the threshold cut on those working for a living, while being a pure tax rise for those not working for their income. Overall, net, it was a tax rise.
Why do you repeat this bollocks about a "tax cut" as salting the earth when income tax was put up (that is the effect of a threshold freeze) by enough to more than counter the NI cut?
As we have ever higher proportions of people getting their income through means that don't require paying NI, but do require paying Income Tax, merging NI and Income Tax together is both good for the Exchequer and the right and fair thing to do - and that small step to doing so was fully funded!
Because you're looking at the mix of taxes, I'm looking at the total. Government spending is still massively greater than government income.
And nobody has a politically acceptable and realistic way of cutting government spending.
The only way to realistically cut government spending is to stop doing stuff.
WFA is a good example. It could have been sold (someone had a narrative up thread) and it could have saved a meaningful amount of money.
As important as the election of Donald Trump this week was the launch of deepseek in China. China has now caught up with the US in AI . Massive implications.
you haven’t used deepseek r1 yet, you’re missing out. watching the model argue with itself, test ideas, & refine its approach feels eerily close to human cognition. it’s not just producing answers—it’s thinking out loud, & the effect is uncanny.
for the first time, it genuinely feels like we’re sharing the planet with another form of intelligence. seeing its thought process unfold makes you realize how close we are to asi—closer than most people are ready to admit.
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
Agreed. There should be a way to keep something like the triple lock for poorest pensioners, while clawing some back from the most wealthy.
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
I think this is exactly the point - there are different classes of pensioners. Hence the triple lock is a blunt force tool.
For what it’s worth, I believe in the universality of the state pension - I think it’s important for the social contract that people are seen to have a pension income having “paid in” (I know that is a bit of a loaded term) during their working life.
But it is unaffordable to keep raising it in the way that is currently being done. So what to do? The key thing is targeting the pensioners who are on low incomes. Hence the importance of things like pension credit, and why perhaps in the long term Reeves’ rejigging of the WFA system might (inadvertently, I think) actually make it easier to introduce sensible reform of that area in the future.
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
Basic pension is going up by £470 a year in April, which is about £200 faster than inflation. (Last ripples of the inflation spike feeding into wages, mostly.)
Job done.
That will mean the Cole household will be almost £1k per year better off (before tax). Even allowing for the increase in alcohol tax on wine I suspect we'll be better off. Definitely confirms our wisdom in voting Labour!
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
I think they’d want to avoid that due to the cost of admin.
When the duck breaks it won’t be the selfish boomers in receipt of a pension who are affected but those of us who are not yet in receipt but have been paying for it all our working lives.
Labour have, as is rightly put upthread, screwed its own supporters over to protect Tory voters.
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
I think this is exactly the point - there are different classes of pensioners. Hence the triple lock is a blunt force tool.
For what it’s worth, I believe in the universality of the state pension - I think it’s important for the social contract that people are seen to have a pension income having “paid in” (I know that is a bit of a loaded term) during their working life.
But it is unaffordable to keep raising it in the way that is currently being done. So what to do? The key thing is targeting the pensioners who are on low incomes. Hence the importance of things like pension credit, and why perhaps in the long term Reeves’ rejigging of the WFA system might (inadvertently, I think) actually make it easier to introduce sensible reform of that area in the future.
A more sophisticated version of Pension Credit is needed, so that people who just miss out on qualifying don't end significantly poorer than those who do qualify. Does anyone know just how much all the benefits attached to Pension Credit are worth? What level of income does it equate to?
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
I think this is exactly the point - there are different classes of pensioners. Hence the triple lock is a blunt force tool.
For what it’s worth, I believe in the universality of the state pension - I think it’s important for the social contract that people are seen to have a pension income having “paid in” (I know that is a bit of a loaded term) during their working life.
But it is unaffordable to keep raising it in the way that is currently being done. So what to do? The key thing is targeting the pensioners who are on low incomes. Hence the importance of things like pension credit, and why perhaps in the long term Reeves’ rejigging of the WFA system might (inadvertently, I think) actually make it easier to introduce sensible reform of that area in the future.
Should the basic state pension = the income tax personal allowance? Otherwise we're in danger of chasing individual pensioners for minuscule amounts of tax.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
I think they’d want to avoid that due to the cost of admin.
When the duck breaks it won’t be the selfish boomers in receipt of a pension who are affected but those of us who are not yet in receipt but have been paying for it all our working lives.
Labour have, as is rightly put upthread, screwed its own supporters over to protect Tory voters.
I know boomers who have been retired for 30 years now, change their car every year and still moan
I was reading a story about a court in India ordering the seizure of some 'offensive' paintings, and enjoyed the recounting of a previous legal story regarding the artist - for a Supreme Court decision it sounds like it was pleasantly accessible to the non-legally inclined in its language.
The court also rejected calls for Husain, then in exile, to be summoned and asked to explain his paintings, which were accused of outraging religious sentiments and disturbing national integrity.
"There are so many such subjects, photographs and publications. Will you file cases against all of them? What about temple structures? Husain's work is art. If you don't want to see it, don't see it. There are so many such art forms in temple structures," the top court said.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
1.Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 29%, Con – 29%, LD 16%, Reform 35%
2.Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 19%, Con – 19%, LD 11%, Reform 23%
3.Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025: 12
4.Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025: 6
5.Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025: 4
6.Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025: 4
7.Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election: 158
8.UK CPI figure for November 2025: 2.3%
9.UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025: £141bn
10. UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025: 1.7%
11.US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025: 2.5%
12.EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025: 1.5%
13.USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025: 100 USD/RUB
14.The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series: Australia 3-1 England
Good morning one and all. Bright, with a gentle breeze here today. A little chilly, but after all we are in January.
One of the issues with the triple lock is that while there are quite a few pensioners with adequate pensions and realisable assets there are also quite a few (a similar number?) with neither. Mrs C and I are among the fortunate, but we do know people who are in the other category. Losing the WFP was of little concern to us, but it might have been better to pay it this year and sort out a better scheme..... one which left us out, but allowed for those in difficulties ...... next year. Maybe a 'better' scheme can be devised for this autumn, in which case most, of not all, will be forgotten.
I think this is exactly the point - there are different classes of pensioners. Hence the triple lock is a blunt force tool.
For what it’s worth, I believe in the universality of the state pension - I think it’s important for the social contract that people are seen to have a pension income having “paid in” (I know that is a bit of a loaded term) during their working life.
But it is unaffordable to keep raising it in the way that is currently being done. So what to do? The key thing is targeting the pensioners who are on low incomes. Hence the importance of things like pension credit, and why perhaps in the long term Reeves’ rejigging of the WFA system might (inadvertently, I think) actually make it easier to introduce sensible reform of that area in the future.
Should the basic state pension = the income tax personal allowance? Otherwise we're in danger of chasing individual pensioners for minuscule amounts of tax.
Same applies to bank interest. Deduct tax at source at basic rate, no need to chase it up through self-assessment (which used to be the system). Anyone exempt can ask nicely for a refund the following year.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
I don't think Trump expects to take Greenland by force; he expects Denmark to roll over. Which is why this is a crisis for Denmark. Do they roll over or do they resist, when they absolutely don't want to do either?
It's really good that they're thinking of making a live-action counterpoint to the TV Series "Occupied".
For some reason, the Greenlanders seem really pissed off with Denmark. God knows why, as they get an incredible deal from them. (Probably an example of no good deed goes unpunished). So, I think the US could bribe them into becoming a US protectorate.
I don't think Trump expects to take Greenland by force; he expects Denmark to roll over. Which is why this is a crisis for Denmark. Do they roll over or do they resist, when they absolutely don't want to do either?
The obvious move would be to facilitate a transparent and fair referendum in Greenland asap to discern the will of the people, though we all know how reluctant sovereign states are to do that.
AFAIK the Greenlandic government has the power to call that referendum. I assume the issue of the ending of Danish subsidies amounting to 40% of GDP and 60% of government income are complicating the decision to go ahead by the pro independence PM. However if Trump offered to substitute those subsidies from the US I would guess the calculation might change.
Assuming the Danish government isn't as petulant and minatory as governments tend to be in these situations (a dangerous assumption I know), it would be a great opportunity to guarantee a smooth transition with gradually reducing subsidies as Greenland comes into its own as an independent nation.
I don't think Greenlanders have internalised that Trump isn't offering them independence. He hasn't offered them anything at all because he doesn't believe they or their views are of any relevance.
If it does come to a choice, which they may have no agency over, of full control by Trump's America or quasi independence with subsidies under Denmark they might prefer America if they think it will benefit them economically. I could see Denmark continuing the subsidies when they originally intended to stop them after the transfer because Trump probably has no intention of continuing them and that would be payment to get rid of a problem.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Question: would the UK economy be better off if the Sunak/Hunt team had been supervising the economy these past six months with their supposed "biased towards politics" schtick versus the Starmer/Reeves "bias towards government"?
Wouldn’t have made much difference. Possibly worse. Hunt would have faced reality too and would have had to rolled back policies designed to engineer an election bounce. I guess the right wing press might have been less hysterical.
Which is precisely why we had an early election.
In theory the last day for a GE was 28/1/25 so we could still have a Tory government if they had wanted to go as long as they could, but having salted the earth and a giveaway budget they knew that it would be better to skip town than face reality.
And that is why, as an old-school conservative, I can't admire Sunak and Hunt, for all they started by clearing some of the mess their predecessors gave them.
Politically, they were doomed from day one. They were perfectly placed to do government-not-politics and fix some of the politically impossible problems the nation has. Not only did they flunk that, they made things worse with their NI cuts and joke spending plans.
Again with this bullshit about "NI cuts" that you know is not true.
They put taxes up not down by freezing the thresholds and raising NI which cushions the impact of the threshold cut on those working for a living, while being a pure tax rise for those not working for their income. Overall, net, it was a tax rise.
Why do you repeat this bollocks about a "tax cut" as salting the earth when income tax was put up (that is the effect of a threshold freeze) by enough to more than counter the NI cut?
As we have ever higher proportions of people getting their income through means that don't require paying NI, but do require paying Income Tax, merging NI and Income Tax together is both good for the Exchequer and the right and fair thing to do - and that small step to doing so was fully funded!
Because you're looking at the mix of taxes, I'm looking at the total. Government spending is still massively greater than government income.
And nobody has a politically acceptable and realistic way of cutting government spending.
The only way to realistically cut government spending is to stop doing stuff.
WFA is a good example. It could have been sold (someone had a narrative up thread) and it could have saved a meaningful amount of money.
Stopping doing some things, while funding the remainder properly, is better than cheese pairing.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
I think they’d want to avoid that due to the cost of admin.
When the duck breaks it won’t be the selfish boomers in receipt of a pension who are affected but those of us who are not yet in receipt but have been paying for it all our working lives.
Labour have, as is rightly put upthread, screwed its own supporters over to protect Tory voters.
You can just see what will happen in the medium term. When the affordability crisis in the state pension is finally addressed, it'll be done largely through hiking the qualifying age further and faster. The obvious mechanism to correct the pensioner to worker ratio, given that mandatory euthanasia at 80 is unlikely to pass Parliament, is to force those not already in receipt to work longer.
I'm meant to collect my state handout when I'm 67 but doubt I'll see it this side of 70. The pension age for young people starting out now will probably end up being closer to 75.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Given pensioners turnout to vote at a far higher rate than under 50s I wouldn't count on that. Plus if you have paid national insurance allowance your working life you are entitled to some state pension
For some reason, the Greenlanders seem really pissed off with Denmark. God knows why, as they get an incredible deal from them. (Probably an example of no good deed goes unpunished). So, I think the US could bribe them into becoming a US protectorate.
The Greenlanders were rather badly treated in earlier times (?'50's). Enforced contraception (coils) among other things IIRC.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
There's a difference between: not pretending that government finances are OK; and presenting the problems with wall to wall gloom without any hint of how you're going to tackle them with a bit of hope at the end of X years.
Good morning, everyone.
Personally, I think the Starmer Government presentation has been very over optimistic.
We are coming from a position where there has been deliberate underinvestment, and decisions not to make the most basic necessary investments, in every area of national life I can think of, for nearly 15 years.
It's not just the current snapshot, it's a legacy of intentional or permitted national dilapidation which has to be repaired.
For an example, take an area of pavement out of town near you - and compare the Google Streetview snapshots from say 2008 and 2022. The difference can be a total shocker.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
I think they’d want to avoid that due to the cost of admin.
When the duck breaks it won’t be the selfish boomers in receipt of a pension who are affected but those of us who are not yet in receipt but have been paying for it all our working lives.
Labour have, as is rightly put upthread, screwed its own supporters over to protect Tory voters.
You can just see what will happen in the medium term. When the affordability crisis in the state pension is finally addressed, it'll be done largely through hiking the qualifying age further and faster. The obvious mechanism to correct the pensioner to worker ratio, given that mandatory euthanasia at 80 is unlikely to pass Parliament, is to force those not already in receipt to work longer.
I'm meant to collect my state handout when I'm 67 but doubt I'll see it this side of 70. The pension age for young people starting out now will probably end up being closer to 75.
So long as they tell you in good time, otherwise you'll be a waspi man.
I don't think Trump expects to take Greenland by force; he expects Denmark to roll over. Which is why this is a crisis for Denmark. Do they roll over or do they resist, when they absolutely don't want to do either?
The obvious move would be to facilitate a transparent and fair referendum in Greenland asap to discern the will of the people, though we all know how reluctant sovereign states are to do that.
AFAIK the Greenlandic government has the power to call that referendum. I assume the issue of the ending of Danish subsidies amounting to 40% of GDP and 60% of government income are complicating the decision to go ahead by the pro independence PM. However if Trump offered to substitute those subsidies from the US I would guess the calculation might change.
Assuming the Danish government isn't as petulant and minatory as governments tend to be in these situations (a dangerous assumption I know), it would be a great opportunity to guarantee a smooth transition with gradually reducing subsidies as Greenland comes into its own as an independent nation.
I don't think Greenlanders have internalised that Trump isn't offering them independence. He hasn't offered them anything at all because he doesn't believe they or their views are of any relevance.
If it does come to a choice, which they may have no agency over, of full control by Trump's America or quasi independence with subsidies under Denmark they might prefer America if they think it will benefit them economically. I could see Denmark continuing the subsidies when they originally intended to stop them after the transfer because Trump probably has no intention of continuing them and that would be payment to get rid of a problem.
We could call it Danegeld.
In these respects Trump is behaving as an intending old fashioned imperialist - like Theodore Roosevelt, who essentially magicked up a fake war with Spain so he could occupy Cuba.
In one sense that's just how the USA rolls, and anybody else can f*ck themselves.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
I think they’d want to avoid that due to the cost of admin.
When the duck breaks it won’t be the selfish boomers in receipt of a pension who are affected but those of us who are not yet in receipt but have been paying for it all our working lives.
Labour have, as is rightly put upthread, screwed its own supporters over to protect Tory voters.
You can just see what will happen in the medium term. When the affordability crisis in the state pension is finally addressed, it'll be done largely through hiking the qualifying age further and faster. The obvious mechanism to correct the pensioner to worker ratio, given that mandatory euthanasia at 80 is unlikely to pass Parliament, is to force those not already in receipt to work longer.
I'm meant to collect my state handout when I'm 67 but doubt I'll see it this side of 70. The pension age for young people starting out now will probably end up being closer to 75.
So long as they tell you in good time, otherwise you'll be a waspi man.
We may not get that much notice at all. It'll be "the state is broke, suck it up." All sorts of previously unthinkable things become possible when a Government becomes effectively insolvent. Ask the Greeks.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Question: would the UK economy be better off if the Sunak/Hunt team had been supervising the economy these past six months with their supposed "biased towards politics" schtick versus the Starmer/Reeves "bias towards government"?
Wouldn’t have made much difference. Possibly worse. Hunt would have faced reality too and would have had to rolled back policies designed to engineer an election bounce. I guess the right wing press might have been less hysterical.
Which is precisely why we had an early election.
In theory the last day for a GE was 28/1/25 so we could still have a Tory government if they had wanted to go as long as they could, but having salted the earth and a giveaway budget they knew that it would be better to skip town than face reality.
And that is why, as an old-school conservative, I can't admire Sunak and Hunt, for all they started by clearing some of the mess their predecessors gave them.
Politically, they were doomed from day one. They were perfectly placed to do government-not-politics and fix some of the politically impossible problems the nation has. Not only did they flunk that, they made things worse with their NI cuts and joke spending plans.
Again with this bullshit about "NI cuts" that you know is not true.
They put taxes up not down by freezing the thresholds and raising NI which cushions the impact of the threshold cut on those working for a living, while being a pure tax rise for those not working for their income. Overall, net, it was a tax rise.
Why do you repeat this bollocks about a "tax cut" as salting the earth when income tax was put up (that is the effect of a threshold freeze) by enough to more than counter the NI cut?
As we have ever higher proportions of people getting their income through means that don't require paying NI, but do require paying Income Tax, merging NI and Income Tax together is both good for the Exchequer and the right and fair thing to do - and that small step to doing so was fully funded!
Absolutely not. NI should be ringfenced for the state pension and JSA and some healthcare and social care costs
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
But it wont be current pensioners who get their state pensions means tested.
It will be future pensioners who have both paid their taxes and funded their own personal pensions who would lose out.
While future pensioners who have neither paid their taxes nor funded their own personal pensions will not lose out.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Trump has started dismissing Independent Inspectors responsible for checks and balances in Federal Agencies. These are like internal ombudsmen, guardians of probity.
Dismissing them at midnight, immediately by email, at the weekend.
The law requires Congress to be given 30 days notice before such action.
Most of these were appointed by Trump in his first term.
IMO he is removing people who could be a check on his nefarious, quite possibly criminal, manipulations. Expect incoming lawsuits on these next week, as he is ultra vires.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
Prompts the question "how many divisions does the EU have?"
(none, yet...)
Just make sure they’re not Hungarian troops
Well, quite.
There's not going to be an EU army, but a semi-permanent European "coalition of the willing" to back up European interests when the US isn't willing to seems needed now.
Trouble is, once that nascent European Army starts being constructed, the American military will wave Europe "cheerio...." because we can do it ourselves.
Europe should be focused on defending its own continent, the US is more focused on containing China now
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
There's a difference between: not pretending that government finances are OK; and presenting the problems with wall to wall gloom without any hint of how you're going to tackle them with a bit of hope at the end of X years.
Good morning, everyone.
Personally, I think the Starmer Government presentation has been very over optimistic.
We are coming from a position where there has been deliberate underinvestment, and decisions not to make the most basic necessary investments, in every area of national life I can think of, for nearly 15 years.
It's not just the current snapshot, it's a legacy of intentional or permitted national dilapidation which has to be repaired.
For an example, take an area of pavement out of town near you - and compare the Google Streetview snapshots from say 2008 and 2022. The difference can be a total shocker.
I think that's true, but nevertheless the approach needed was some way of inspiring people that this mountain can be climbed, we have a plan, it will work eventually. If they have no natural leaders who can inspire others, then they needed good speech writers to produce the inspiring material for them.
Trump lost because he was rubbish. He couldn’t sustain an effective team and use data to make decisions, so he lost once people got bored of the hype and felt the cost of poorly implemented, badly researched policies in their pocket.
Nothing indicates that this has changed.
Closer to home, we have to defeat our right wing populists. Badenoch telling Truss to shut up was a good thing.
The disadvantage for Badenoch is that this means that more people might become aware of the nonsense she is spouting.
I take Badenoch over Truss. It’s a start
I'm sure the Tories will work out where to file your valuable advice.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
The next generation of pensioners would just vote for a party rejecting that
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
I don't know what the numbers are, but I think eliminating NI over time so that all income is taxed will alleviate this considerably and is a gentler and less contentious way to do this.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
We'll need to wait until after the next election to resolve that. For now we have a Labour Party who won a massive landslide victory. They have over four more years to use their democratic mandate to prove it can be governed.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
The next generation of pensioners would just vote for a party rejecting that
There may not be such a party. There's a cross-party consensus on raising the pension age, and that's probably where we'll go with the triple lock.
It's money being wasted, on people who do not need it.
Trump has started dismissing Independent Inspectors responsible for checks and balances in Federal Agencies. These are like internal ombudsmen, guardians of probity.
Dismissing them at midnight, immediately by email, at the weekend.
The law requires Congress to be given 30 days notice before such action.
Most of these were appointed by Trump in his first term.
IMO he is removing people who could be a check on his nefarious, quite possibly criminal, manipulations. Expect incoming lawsuits on these next week, as he is ultra vires.
He has immunity for all his actions, what does it matter if he breaks the rules persistently? Anyone who doesn't follow orders gets fired and replaced.
Yet still people get mocked on here for stating it is the end of democracy.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
The next generation of pensioners would just vote for a party rejecting that
There may not be such a party. There's a cross-party consensus on raising the pension age, and that's probably where we'll go with the triple lock.
It's money being wasted, on people who do not need it.
Phase the pension in. In your sixties a lot of people work 3 or 4 day weeks so give a 20-40% type pension with no other benefits like winter fuel, free travel etc from perhaps 62 or 63. Move it up to 50-70% around 67 and a full pension at 70.
Trump has started dismissing Independent Inspectors responsible for checks and balances in Federal Agencies. These are like internal ombudsmen, guardians of probity.
Dismissing them at midnight, immediately by email, at the weekend.
The law requires Congress to be given 30 days notice before such action.
Most of these were appointed by Trump in his first term.
IMO he is removing people who could be a check on his nefarious, quite possibly criminal, manipulations. Expect incoming lawsuits on these next week, as he is ultra vires.
He has immunity for all his actions, what does it matter if he breaks the rules persistently? Anyone who doesn't follow orders gets fired and replaced.
Yet still people get mocked on here for stating it is the end of democracy.
Trump has started dismissing Independent Inspectors responsible for checks and balances in Federal Agencies. These are like internal ombudsmen, guardians of probity.
Dismissing them at midnight, immediately by email, at the weekend.
The law requires Congress to be given 30 days notice before such action.
Most of these were appointed by Trump in his first term.
IMO he is removing people who could be a check on his nefarious, quite possibly criminal, manipulations. Expect incoming lawsuits on these next week, as he is ultra vires.
He has immunity for all his actions, what does it matter if he breaks the rules persistently? Anyone who doesn't follow orders gets fired and replaced.
Yet still people get mocked on here for stating it is the end of democracy.
The end of *a* democracy is threatened, perhaps.
Where's that coronary, when the USA needs him to have one?
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Plus if you have paid national insurance allowance your working life you are entitled to some state pension
Yes, that's the current situation but it's a political contract and not a legal one.
There's nothing to stop a future government changing the law to change the entitlement.
For some reason, the Greenlanders seem really pissed off with Denmark. God knows why, as they get an incredible deal from them. (Probably an example of no good deed goes unpunished). So, I think the US could bribe them into becoming a US protectorate.
The Greenlanders were rather badly treated in earlier times (?'50's). Enforced contraception (coils) among other things IIRC.
Good morning
Having been to Greenland it is so remote, and actually feels like part of North America/Canada.
I can understand why Greenlanders would like to be independent and have close ties with the US for security
Just as the Falklands, the Greenlanders should have a vote on their choice of sovereignty
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
The next generation of pensioners would just vote for a party rejecting that
It will be interesting to see how the recent large-scale immigration alters our politics. It seems unlikely that, even if they survive, our traditional political parties will remain in their historic veins. I don't know whether my understanding is correct that Islam has an entirely different approach to debt, but to use that as an example, if it were true then presumably a Muslim-majority political party would want to deal with the country's debt and get rid of it. Also Muslim families seem to be much tighter-knit than ours are nowadays, so there may be much more reliance on families for providing necessary care.
Prompts the question "how many divisions does the EU have?"
(none, yet...)
Just make sure they’re not Hungarian troops
Well, quite.
There's not going to be an EU army, but a semi-permanent European "coalition of the willing" to back up European interests when the US isn't willing to seems needed now.
Trouble is, once that nascent European Army starts being constructed, the American military will wave Europe "cheerio...." because we can do it ourselves.
Europe should be focused on defending its own continent, the US is more focused on containing China now
China has to work out whether the price of forcing Taiwan back into the fold is worth the massive loss of world markets that would follow on from the sanctions in every sector, making much trade impossible (even if that would be the world cutting off its nose to spite its face). At the moment, China pretty much gets everything it wants by commercial means, with a little espionage thrown in.
The Chinese economy is not without its own massive concerns. The cost of acquiring Taiwan could make the cost of Russia's atempt to bag Ukraine pale in comparison. And why rush? Everyone knows they still stake their claim; that's not going to be forgotten. China has a patience unparalleled by any other regime, especially those that have four or five year electoral cycles.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
There's a difference between: not pretending that government finances are OK; and presenting the problems with wall to wall gloom without any hint of how you're going to tackle them with a bit of hope at the end of X years.
Good morning, everyone.
Personally, I think the Starmer Government presentation has been very over optimistic.
We are coming from a position where there has been deliberate underinvestment, and decisions not to make the most basic necessary investments, in every area of national life I can think of, for nearly 15 years.
It's not just the current snapshot, it's a legacy of intentional or permitted national dilapidation which has to be repaired.
For an example, take an area of pavement out of town near you - and compare the Google Streetview snapshots from say 2008 and 2022. The difference can be a total shocker.
I think that's true, but nevertheless the approach needed was some way of inspiring people that this mountain can be climbed, we have a plan, it will work eventually. If they have no natural leaders who can inspire others, then they needed good speech writers to produce the inspiring material for them.
I think the trained-in cynicism may be too great. It will require noticeable change over a period of time, that is the solution that Margaret Hodge suggested was the answer to Nick Griffin's politics, when it was him and not Nigel Farage's followers and Robert Jenrick expressing those values.
What is perhaps indicated is one, or maybe two, budgets to each raise the extra revenue ... via mainly taxes on capital ... as the recent budget.
Prompts the question "how many divisions does the EU have?"
(none, yet...)
Just make sure they’re not Hungarian troops
Well, quite.
There's not going to be an EU army, but a semi-permanent European "coalition of the willing" to back up European interests when the US isn't willing to seems needed now.
Trouble is, once that nascent European Army starts being constructed, the American military will wave Europe "cheerio...." because we can do it ourselves.
Europe should be focused on defending its own continent, the US is more focused on containing China now
China has to work out whether the price of forcing Taiwan back into the fold is worth the massive loss of world markets that would follow on from the sanctions in every sector, making much trade impossible (even if that would be the world cutting off its nose to spite its face). At the moment, China pretty much gets everything it wants by commercial means, with a little espionage thrown in.
The Chinese economy is not without its own massive concerns. The cost of acquiring Taiwan could make the cost of Russia's atempt to bag Ukraine pale in comparison. And why rush? Everyone knows they still stake their claim; that's not going to be forgotten. China has a patience unparalleled by any other regime, especially those that have four or five year electoral cycles.
The problem is not China, the problem is Xi.
China has boundless patience, but Xi wants his legacy.
For some reason, the Greenlanders seem really pissed off with Denmark. God knows why, as they get an incredible deal from them. (Probably an example of no good deed goes unpunished). So, I think the US could bribe them into becoming a US protectorate.
The Greenlanders were rather badly treated in earlier times (?'50's). Enforced contraception (coils) among other things IIRC.
Good morning
Having been to Greenland it is so remote, and actually feels like part of North America/Canada.
I can understand why Greenlanders would like to be independent and have close ties with the US for security
Just as the Falklands, the Greenlanders should have a vote on their choice of sovereignty
The Greenland government wants independence from both Denmark and the USA
Absolute chaos: Trump called the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the United States.
According to the Financial Times, which cites five current and former senior European officials, the conversation was a disaster. Trump was reportedly aggressive and confrontational, rejecting all offers of cooperation from Denmark and focusing solely on acquiring Greenland.
Officials described the exchange as “very bad,” with the Danes left absolutely horrified by Trump’s tone and behavior. What was initially dismissed as a political stunt has now left European allies deeply alarmed, as many believe Trump is serious about annexing the world’s largest island.
This is a massive embarrassment for the U.S. on the world stage. Denmark is a key NATO ally, and Trump’s antics are raising serious questions about American diplomacy.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Plus if you have paid national insurance allowance your working life you are entitled to some state pension
Yes, that's the current situation but it's a political contract and not a legal one.
There's nothing to stop a future government changing the law to change the entitlement.
There is as they would get voted out, after all national insurance was originally set up to fund contributory unemployment benefits and the state pension.
Ironically the only party leader talking about means testing more pensioner benefits at the moment is Badenoch, the LDs are firmly anti and Labour won't go any further after their winter fuel allowance cuts which were hugely unpopular with pensioners
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
The next generation of pensioners would just vote for a party rejecting that
There may not be such a party. There's a cross-party consensus on raising the pension age, and that's probably where we'll go with the triple lock.
It's money being wasted, on people who do not need it.
Is there? The LDs would certainly jump on the bandwagon to keep the Triple Lock followed probably by Reform.
Even Labour hit Badenoch when she suggested means testing the Triple Lock
Absolute chaos: Trump called the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the United States.
According to the Financial Times, which cites five current and former senior European officials, the conversation was a disaster. Trump was reportedly aggressive and confrontational, rejecting all offers of cooperation from Denmark and focusing solely on acquiring Greenland.
Officials described the exchange as “very bad,” with the Danes left absolutely horrified by Trump’s tone and behavior. What was initially dismissed as a political stunt has now left European allies deeply alarmed, as many believe Trump is serious about annexing the world’s largest island.
This is a massive embarrassment for the U.S. on the world stage. Denmark is a key NATO ally, and Trump’s antics are raising serious questions about American diplomacy.
Prompts the question "how many divisions does the EU have?"
(none, yet...)
Just make sure they’re not Hungarian troops
Well, quite.
There's not going to be an EU army, but a semi-permanent European "coalition of the willing" to back up European interests when the US isn't willing to seems needed now.
Trouble is, once that nascent European Army starts being constructed, the American military will wave Europe "cheerio...." because we can do it ourselves.
Europe should be focused on defending its own continent, the US is more focused on containing China now
China has to work out whether the price of forcing Taiwan back into the fold is worth the massive loss of world markets that would follow on from the sanctions in every sector, making much trade impossible (even if that would be the world cutting off its nose to spite its face). At the moment, China pretty much gets everything it wants by commercial means, with a little espionage thrown in.
The Chinese economy is not without its own massive concerns. The cost of acquiring Taiwan could make the cost of Russia's atempt to bag Ukraine pale in comparison. And why rush? Everyone knows they still stake their claim; that's not going to be forgotten. China has a patience unparalleled by any other regime, especially those that have four or five year electoral cycles.
Although with the USA about to embark on wars with Mexico, Panama, Canada and Denmark (and hence the EU) not to mention a subversive campaign to undermine the elected Government of the UK and promote candidates from the extreme right including Tommy Ten Names, now seems to be the optimal point on the calendar to snatch Taiwan.
Prompts the question "how many divisions does the EU have?"
(none, yet...)
Just make sure they’re not Hungarian troops
Well, quite.
There's not going to be an EU army, but a semi-permanent European "coalition of the willing" to back up European interests when the US isn't willing to seems needed now.
Trouble is, once that nascent European Army starts being constructed, the American military will wave Europe "cheerio...." because we can do it ourselves.
Europe should be focused on defending its own continent, the US is more focused on containing China now
China has to work out whether the price of forcing Taiwan back into the fold is worth the massive loss of world markets that would follow on from the sanctions in every sector, making much trade impossible (even if that would be the world cutting off its nose to spite its face). At the moment, China pretty much gets everything it wants by commercial means, with a little espionage thrown in.
The Chinese economy is not without its own massive concerns. The cost of acquiring Taiwan could make the cost of Russia's atempt to bag Ukraine pale in comparison. And why rush? Everyone knows they still stake their claim; that's not going to be forgotten. China has a patience unparalleled by any other regime, especially those that have four or five year electoral cycles.
Although with the USA about to embark on wars with Mexico, Panama, Canada and Denmark (and hence the EU) not to mention a subversive campaign to undermine the elected Government of the UK and promote candidates from the extreme right including Tommy Ten Names, now seems to be the optimal point on the calendar to snatch Taiwan.
Sod it, do you think they may be distracted enough to make it worthwhile us having another crack at Boston?
Body of text too long so post divided 1/2 It was not the way the US rolled after the Second World War, where they understood that partnership with Japan and Europe would be a massive benefit to the US and indeed give them global leadership.
This return to the beggar thy neighbour policies of the post World War one "age of Normalcy", is ultimately going to lead to a level of destabilisation that could not only directly impoverish the US but even lead to nuclear conflict.
As for the UK? We need leaders with vision, not the American funded media confections of Farage et al, nor the plodders like SKS so far. Navigating a world where the United States is -at best- indifferent and in many cases actively hostile is going to require a whole new set of ideas. Clearly we need allies and we need to secure the European space against Putin before anything else.
So first things first: we need to rearm now and prepare for the evacuation of US forces from the UK. Investment in missile defence systems, and much stronger defences against cyber and other hybrid/terrorist attacks needs to start straight away. That also means also working with the JEF countries (Nordic, Baltic and the Netherlands) to ensure security on our North East flank against Russian direct and hybrid attacks, especially against the North Sea energy fields and our logistics and communications links. This could be critical if NATO chains of command become compromised by US hostility or non cooperation.
Secondly we need to restore the trade links that have been badly damaged by Brexit. In addition we need to restore the political framework for consultation with the major European powers such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. The best way would be re-entry into the EU, which I now think is a possibility, but in any event we should engage bilaterally and within the European political community starting now. Friedrich Merz will not necessarily be an easy partner either personally or politically for Starmer, but he needs to be first into Berlin (after Macron) and a framework for a London/Berlin entente needs to be put into place. France will have to wait until the political uncertainty in Paris is fully resolved, so Berlin needs to be the first focus.
2/2 Reeves tin ear and incompetence should now force Starmer to get rid of her. A left field suggestion for a replacement would be Liam Byrne, who has served in the Treasury and knows where the bodies are buried, but whose "there´s no money" letter crippled his future advancement, so his elevation would make him political loyal to Starmer. He also understands the problem and has published interesting books on entrepreneurship and business (He´s an Ex- Rothschild Banker). If he can get through the inevitable mud slinging at him, I think he certainly has the vision and the skills to control the overmighty Treasury mandarins who have not been quelled by Reeves.
We need to secure the domestic political security of the UK too. No foreign money whatsoever in UK politics. Careful monitoring of subversive propaganda whether online or in other media. Personally I would consider a pretty draconian ban on foreign owners of any UK media. Murdoch will be dead soon, so his baleful and malign influence is coming to an end, but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Most of all I think we need to adopt a less pessimistic, more realistic mind set, Britain is not a poverty stricken hell hole, and we are as a country generally respected around the world. Our economy is turning and we produce more and more of better and better products. We are a solid, open democracy. We are a tolerant and open country largely inhabited by decent and fair minded people. I do not believe that a corrupt braggart like Trump could ever survive our mocking sense of humour (which is why, by the way I still believe that the millionaires darling, Farage, will never achieve power, even if he gains/retains his negative influence). His advance is a symptom of the spectacular implosion of the Tories, not any particular genius of his own.
We now face a serious crisis. We need to stop wallowing in self pity and take practical steps to solve our problems.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
If it is, we've made it that way by demanding the impossible from our politicians.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
If it is, we've made it that way by demanding the impossible from our politicians.
Absolute chaos: Trump called the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the United States.
According to the Financial Times, which cites five current and former senior European officials, the conversation was a disaster. Trump was reportedly aggressive and confrontational, rejecting all offers of cooperation from Denmark and focusing solely on acquiring Greenland.
Officials described the exchange as “very bad,” with the Danes left absolutely horrified by Trump’s tone and behavior. What was initially dismissed as a political stunt has now left European allies deeply alarmed, as many believe Trump is serious about annexing the world’s largest island.
This is a massive embarrassment for the U.S. on the world stage. Denmark is a key NATO ally, and Trump’s antics are raising serious questions about American diplomacy.
What is Trump even doing?
Whatever he damn well wants.
And how many of us, with that much power and that little in the way of check or balance, would do any different.
Absolute chaos: Trump called the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the United States.
According to the Financial Times, which cites five current and former senior European officials, the conversation was a disaster. Trump was reportedly aggressive and confrontational, rejecting all offers of cooperation from Denmark and focusing solely on acquiring Greenland.
Officials described the exchange as “very bad,” with the Danes left absolutely horrified by Trump’s tone and behavior. What was initially dismissed as a political stunt has now left European allies deeply alarmed, as many believe Trump is serious about annexing the world’s largest island.
This is a massive embarrassment for the U.S. on the world stage. Denmark is a key NATO ally, and Trump’s antics are raising serious questions about American diplomacy.
What is Trump even doing?
Usually porn stars.
Lol. I was scrolling up on Vanilla from the bottom and knew that was your post before I got to your name. Very good.
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
Leaving income tax and NI alone were sensible policies. The milking of wages is already severe; fiddling the pledge by hiking employer NI (which will obviously be passed straight onto workers through redundancy and wage suppression) was bloody stupid.
VAT can be argued either way. I suppose there would've been room to create a new rate of VAT applicable to spending on luxury goods, but that wouldn't have raised an enormous amount. Hiking the rate across the board is a sub-optimal measure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Crossing the Rubicon and applying VAT to all food purchases would raise a lot of money but wreck the finances of households across the bottom half of the income distribution.
The triple lock should've been binned. It's a massive and destructive wealth transfer mechanism, the net effect of which will be, over time, to progressively impoverish the young and poor by handing what little they have to the old and rich. Labour committed a fatal error by failing to explain that it was unaffordable and would have to be replaced by something less generous, and now they are stuck with it - something made all the more astonishing by the fact that the elderly are the only age group that still backed the Tories at the GE. Starmer has fucked over his own supporters to pay for Kemi Badenoch's core voters to be insulated from the endless austerity applied to everyone else. Lunacy.
The net effect will be that when the duck eventually breaks for pensioners, which it will, they'll be far worse off than if the Triple Lock had been dealt with earlier, as it should have been.
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Yeah but that'll probably happen after the current generation of pensioners are deceased and when we are about to start collecting ours instead, so they're happy to vote for that.
The next generation of pensioners would just vote for a party rejecting that
There may not be such a party. There's a cross-party consensus on raising the pension age, and that's probably where we'll go with the triple lock.
It's money being wasted, on people who do not need it.
Is there? The LDs would certainly jump on the bandwagon to keep the Triple Lock followed probably by Reform.
Even Labour hit Badenoch when she suggested means testing the Triple Lock
The triple lock will end at the next GE as it is unaffordable and unfair to put the tax burden on ordinary tax papers and the young
The cost of pensions of £169 billion is also unsustainable and as with the the WFP, why should millionaires receive the state pension when it should be targeted to those on the lower income scale
You can predict what each party will do to your hearts content, but change is coming unless of course you are happy to wait for your pension until you are 75+
Interesting to see a faltering start to Trump’s “mass deportations”. Eighty is a start, his supporters might say and I did idly wonder if the plan would be to cajole other Central American countries other than Guatemala to accept the flights. The “America First” schtick is nothing new but there’s a difference between self interest and isolationism.
Whether it’s an effective method of handling illegal immigration depends on how the new administration chooses to regulate legal migration. The emphasis in the UK remains far too much on “stop the boats” rather than coming up with a coherent and effective policy for legal migration.
There’s probably a policy out there but it will never satisfy those who see all migrants in a particular way and nor will it satisfy those who view the open door as a mechanism for maintaining economic growth via the import of cheap unskilled labour.
As with so much else, it needs to be part of a proactive and planned series of policies. Immigration tends to be reactive and the response to it even more so.
Trump, pace Reagan and Johnson, is all “glad confident morning” and that works superficially. Indeed, those who believe honesty is the best policy have never tried politics. The electorate doesn’t respond well to the truth after a long period of being told everything was fine. Governments of all stripes and none are struggling to get their economies moving and the economic malaise has social and cultural impacts.
Ultimately, government and poltics are different things that have to happen in the same space. Boosterism is excellent politics- it gets you into power. But it's lousy government; you can only really run things sucessfully if you have an utterly realistic understanding of the real situation. If your mental map of the rest of the world is a fantasy, you aren't going to get anywhere.
Some of the mewling we are seeing in the UK at the moment is because we have gone from a government which was biased towards politics to one with a bias towards government. Not all of it, but some of it. So being told the unpleasant reality (that taxes need to go up, not down) is heard as talking the economy down.
(Note that isn't Starmer's only weakness. But some of the anger is because he isn't pretending that the government finances are tickety-boo.)
Talking about tax rises isn’t talking the economy down.
Talking the economy down is talking the economy down.
The government would have been less unpopular if they had, say, merged Income Tax and NI, simplified the rates, and put up the combined tax a bit.
Between pulling people into NI and higher rates, this would have raised a fair bit.
This would have caused a tidal wave of returns from the alt-left parties - Starmer being Proper Labour.
The markets would have taken this as a sign of *funded* increased expenditure. Government borrowing costs would have fallen.
Sold as “Needed to save public services, expand defence spending, tough times etc” - it could have been sold as a positive message of taking tough decisions to deliver results.
Similarly, WFA could have been dealt with as part of a wholesale rebuild of pensioner benefits - “We need to concentrate on the poorest”
Yes, but that all comes back to the promise not to increase rates of income tax, employee NI or VAT, and continue the Triple lock.
No incoming Chancellor should tie their hands like that. It leaves them with no room for financial manoeuvre. Dumb of Starmer/Reeves, particularly so for the whole term. Promising it for the first year or two like Blair did would have been better.
But they had to make the stupid promises to get elected.
Labour had a 20 point lead for months. They had plenty of room to do what Cameron and Osborne did, and gain a mandate for some tougher measures.
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
My feelings about Labour are best summarised as better than the last lot, have some of the right ideas at least, but still not very good. What proportion of their errors are down to incompetence and what proportion are the natural consequence of dealing with a miserable and cakeist electorate is debatable.
Is the country effectively ungovernable now.
Quite possibly. The social contract has collapsed, and once that happens - when the distribution of wealth and opportunity is very unequal, when taxation of earnings is high, and when most of the money raised produces no apparent benefit for those from whom it is being taken - then we very quickly arrive at an every man and woman for themselves situation.
If it is, we've made it that way by demanding the impossible from our politicians.
Body of text too long so post divided 1/2 It was not the way the US rolled after the Second World War, where they understood that partnership with Japan and Europe would be a massive benefit to the US and indeed give them global leadership.
This return to the beggar thy neighbour policies of the post World War one "age of Normalcy", is ultimately going to lead to a level of destabilisation that could not only directly impoverish the US but even lead to nuclear conflict.
As for the UK? We need leaders with vision, not the American funded media confections of Farage et al, nor the plodders like SKS so far. Navigating a world where the United States is -at best- indifferent and in many cases actively hostile is going to require a whole new set of ideas. Clearly we need allies and we need to secure the European space against Putin before anything else.
So first things first: we need to rearm now and prepare for the evacuation of US forces from the UK. Investment in missile defence systems, and much stronger defences against cyber and other hybrid/terrorist attacks needs to start straight away. That also means also working with the JEF countries (Nordic, Baltic and the Netherlands) to ensure security on our North East flank against Russian direct and hybrid attacks, especially against the North Sea energy fields and our logistics and communications links. This could be critical if NATO chains of command become compromised by US hostility or non cooperation.
Secondly we need to restore the trade links that have been badly damaged by Brexit. In addition we need to restore the political framework for consultation with the major European powers such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. The best way would be re-entry into the EU, which I now think is a possibility, but in any event we should engage bilaterally and within the European political community starting now. Friedrich Merz will not necessarily be an easy partner either personally or politically for Starmer, but he needs to be first into Berlin (after Macron) and a framework for a London/Berlin entente needs to be put into place. France will have to wait until the political uncertainty in Paris is fully resolved, so Berlin needs to be the first focus.
Massive investment in defence means cuts elsewhere. So what do we cut.
For some reason, the Greenlanders seem really pissed off with Denmark. God knows why, as they get an incredible deal from them. (Probably an example of no good deed goes unpunished). So, I think the US could bribe them into becoming a US protectorate.
The Greenlanders were rather badly treated in earlier times (?'50's). Enforced contraception (coils) among other things IIRC.
Good morning
Having been to Greenland it is so remote, and actually feels like part of North America/Canada.
I can understand why Greenlanders would like to be independent and have close ties with the US for security
Just as the Falklands, the Greenlanders should have a vote on their choice of sovereignty
Trump's rhetoric - see the FT account of the call with the Danish PM - makes such an outcome unlikely.
Europe can't be seen to give up territory under threat of violence, in the same way the UK would not for the Falklands. It's going to be a US annexation or Danish for decades to come.
2/2 Reeves tin ear and incompetence should now force Starmer to get rid of her. A left field suggestion for a replacement would be Liam Byrne, who has served in the Treasury and knows where the bodies are buried, but whose "there´s no money" letter crippled his future advancement, so his elevation would make him political loyal to Starmer. He also understands the problem and has published interesting books on entrepreneurship and business (He´s an Ex- Rothschild Banker). If he can get through the inevitable mud slinging at him, I think he certainly has the vision and the skills to control the overmighty Treasury mandarins who have not been quelled by Reeves.
We need to secure the domestic political security of the UK too. No foreign money whatsoever in UK politics. Careful monitoring of subversive propaganda whether online or in other media. Personally I would consider a pretty draconian ban on foreign owners of any UK media. Murdoch will be dead soon, so his baleful and malign influence is coming to an end, but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Most of all I think we need to adopt a less pessimistic, more realistic mind set, Britain is not a poverty stricken hell hole, and we are as a country generally respected around the world. Our economy is turning and we produce more and more of better and better products. We are a solid, open democracy. We are a tolerant and open country largely inhabited by decent and fair minded people. I do not believe that a corrupt braggart like Trump could ever survive our mocking sense of humour (which is why, by the way I still believe that the millionaires darling, Farage, will never achieve power, even if he gains/retains his negative influence). His advance is a symptom of the spectacular implosion of the Tories, not any particular genius of his own.
We now face a serious crisis. We need to stop wallowing in self pity and take practical steps to solve our problems.
The doomsaying is overdone, and frankly, would be viewed with contempt, by people who lived 50, 75, or a hundred years ago. People who really had to experience war, poverty, terrorism, and the real threat of Communism.
Ask any serious historian "when was the best time to be born?", and they'd reply "Yesterday."
The UK is a free country (more or less), with a standard of living similar to France, Japan, Canada, and New Zealand. There are much worse fates.
Absolute chaos: Trump called the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the United States.
According to the Financial Times, which cites five current and former senior European officials, the conversation was a disaster. Trump was reportedly aggressive and confrontational, rejecting all offers of cooperation from Denmark and focusing solely on acquiring Greenland.
Officials described the exchange as “very bad,” with the Danes left absolutely horrified by Trump’s tone and behavior. What was initially dismissed as a political stunt has now left European allies deeply alarmed, as many believe Trump is serious about annexing the world’s largest island.
This is a massive embarrassment for the U.S. on the world stage. Denmark is a key NATO ally, and Trump’s antics are raising serious questions about American diplomacy.
What is Trump even doing?
Usually porn stars.
Lol. I was scrolling up on Vanilla from the bottom and knew that was your post before I got to your name. Very good.
Comments
Which means we'll probably end-up with means testing of the state pension.
Job done.
To my ear, this first one overplays resistance attacks, and rather underplays the continuing attempts to extinguish Ukrainian culture with the methods and impacts, but it is very much worth the time to listen.
Deep link: https://youtu.be/-nXoIByvOOo?t=399
1.Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 33%, Con – 29%, LD 16%, Reform 30%
2.Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 22%, Con – 17%, LD 10%, Reform 22%
3.Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025: 5
4.Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025: 0
5.Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025: 1
6.Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025: 2
7.Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election: 165
8.UK CPI figure for November 2025: 2.9%
9.UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025: £122bn
10. UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025: 2%
11.US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025: 2.2%
12.EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025: 1.4%
13.USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025: 130 USD/RUB
14.The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series: Australia 2-2 England
WFA is a good example. It could have been sold (someone had a narrative up thread) and it could have saved a meaningful amount of money.
For what it’s worth, I believe in the universality of the state pension - I think it’s important for the social contract that people are seen to have a pension income having “paid in” (I know that is a bit of a loaded term) during their working life.
But it is unaffordable to keep raising it in the way that is currently being done. So what to do? The key thing is targeting the pensioners who are on low incomes. Hence the importance of things like pension credit, and why perhaps in the long term Reeves’ rejigging of the WFA system might (inadvertently, I think) actually make it easier to introduce sensible reform of that area in the future.
Definitely confirms our wisdom in voting Labour!
When the duck breaks it won’t be the selfish boomers in receipt of a pension who are affected but those of us who are not yet in receipt but have been paying for it all our working lives.
Labour have, as is rightly put upthread, screwed its own supporters over to protect Tory voters.
We really are in for a nutty few years. Fasten your cowboy belts.
The court also rejected calls for Husain, then in exile, to be summoned and asked to explain his paintings, which were accused of outraging religious sentiments and disturbing national integrity.
"There are so many such subjects, photographs and publications. Will you file cases against all of them? What about temple structures? Husain's work is art. If you don't want to see it, don't see it. There are so many such art forms in temple structures," the top court said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg45vk9gnw6o
1.Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 29%, Con – 29%, LD 16%, Reform 35%
2.Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform: LAB – 19%, Con – 19%, LD 11%, Reform 23%
3.Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025: 12
4.Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025: 6
5.Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025: 4
6.Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025: 4
7.Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election: 158
8.UK CPI figure for November 2025: 2.3%
9.UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025: £141bn
10. UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025: 1.7%
11.US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025: 2.5%
12.EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025: 1.5%
13.USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025: 100 USD/RUB
14.The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series: Australia 3-1 England
Instead, they pretended everything would be fine, then in office made a vague comment of tax rises leaving imaginations to run riot for moths, talked down the economy, then hiked NI.
Labour inherited a very bad economic situation. They then proceeded to make it worse.
If it does come to a choice, which they may have no agency over, of full control by Trump's America or quasi independence with subsidies under Denmark they might prefer America if they think it will benefit them economically. I could see Denmark continuing the subsidies when they originally intended to stop them after the transfer because Trump probably has no intention of continuing them and that would be payment to get rid of a problem.
We could call it Danegeld.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9qjde4wnqo
I'm meant to collect my state handout when I'm 67 but doubt I'll see it this side of 70. The pension age for young people starting out now will probably end up being closer to 75.
Crazy days.
We are coming from a position where there has been deliberate underinvestment, and decisions not to make the most basic necessary investments, in every area of national life I can think of, for nearly 15 years.
It's not just the current snapshot, it's a legacy of intentional or permitted national dilapidation which has to be repaired.
For an example, take an area of pavement out of town near you - and compare the Google Streetview snapshots from say 2008 and 2022. The difference can be a total shocker.
In one sense that's just how the USA rolls, and anybody else can f*ck themselves.
It will be future pensioners who have both paid their taxes and funded their own personal pensions who would lose out.
While future pensioners who have neither paid their taxes nor funded their own personal pensions will not lose out.
Dismissing them at midnight, immediately by email, at the weekend.
The law requires Congress to be given 30 days notice before such action.
Most of these were appointed by Trump in his first term.
IMO he is removing people who could be a check on his nefarious, quite possibly criminal, manipulations. Expect incoming lawsuits on these next week, as he is ultra vires.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/24/trump-fire-inspectors-general-federal-agencies/
Europe should be focused on defending its own continent, the US is more focused on containing China now
I would have chosen a more ludicrous name
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
It's money being wasted, on people who do not need it.
Yet still people get mocked on here for stating it is the end of democracy.
Almost always two sides to a story.
Did the British Museum handle his contract and case with proper care, or with callous indifference and incompetence?
I think that better reflects modern life.
Where's that coronary, when the USA needs him to have one?
There's nothing to stop a future government changing the law to change the entitlement.
Having been to Greenland it is so remote, and actually feels like part of North America/Canada.
I can understand why Greenlanders would like to be independent and have close ties with the US for security
Just as the Falklands, the Greenlanders should have a vote on their choice of sovereignty
The Chinese economy is not without its own massive concerns. The cost of acquiring Taiwan could make the cost of Russia's atempt to bag Ukraine pale in comparison. And why rush? Everyone knows they still stake their claim; that's not going to be forgotten. China has a patience unparalleled by any other regime, especially those that have four or five year electoral cycles.
Was there ever a disgruntled employee who thought their employer had dealt with them well?
What is perhaps indicated is one, or maybe two, budgets to each raise the extra revenue ... via mainly taxes on capital ... as the recent budget.
China has boundless patience, but Xi wants his legacy.
"US issues pause on foreign aid, leaked memo says - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9nx5k7lv0o
https://x.com/bloodylikeabody/status/1882602541923652031
Absolute chaos: Trump called the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and demanded that Denmark hand over Greenland to the United States.
According to the Financial Times, which cites five current and former senior European officials, the conversation was a disaster. Trump was reportedly aggressive and confrontational, rejecting all offers of cooperation from Denmark and focusing solely on acquiring Greenland.
Officials described the exchange as “very bad,” with the Danes left absolutely horrified by Trump’s tone and behavior. What was initially dismissed as a political stunt has now left European allies deeply alarmed, as many believe Trump is serious about annexing the world’s largest island.
This is a massive embarrassment for the U.S. on the world stage. Denmark is a key NATO ally, and Trump’s antics are raising serious questions about American diplomacy.
What is Trump even doing?
Ironically the only party leader talking about means testing more pensioner benefits at the moment is Badenoch, the LDs are firmly anti and Labour won't go any further after their winter fuel allowance cuts which were hugely unpopular with pensioners
Tonight, exactly 1 week ago, Donald Trump launched his memecoin, $TRUMP.
Today, it's trading 60% below its all time high with a market cap of $5.8 billion.
This week will go down in the history books.
https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1882947652037628122
Even Labour hit Badenoch when she suggested means testing the Triple Lock
I’ve got a self build PC with a three monitor setup on a built in graphics card.
Ideally I would like to upgrade to a four or five monitor setup.
If I put in a small, low powered graphics card, will that supersede the current one or would it only augment it?
I have a 400kw power supply.
Unfortunately the motherboard doesn’t support Thunderbolt.
It was not the way the US rolled after the Second World War, where they understood that partnership with Japan and Europe would be a massive benefit to the US and indeed give them global leadership.
This return to the beggar thy neighbour policies of the post World War one "age of Normalcy", is ultimately going to lead to a level of destabilisation that could not only directly impoverish the US but even lead to nuclear conflict.
As for the UK? We need leaders with vision, not the American funded media confections of Farage et al, nor the plodders like SKS so far. Navigating a world where the United States is -at best- indifferent and in many cases actively hostile is going to require a whole new set of ideas. Clearly we need allies and we need to secure the European space against Putin before anything else.
So first things first: we need to rearm now and prepare for the evacuation of US forces from the UK. Investment in missile defence systems, and much stronger defences against cyber and other hybrid/terrorist attacks needs to start straight away. That also means also working with the JEF countries (Nordic, Baltic and the Netherlands) to ensure security on our North East flank against Russian direct and hybrid attacks, especially against the North Sea energy fields and our logistics and communications links. This could be critical if NATO chains of command become compromised by US hostility or non cooperation.
Secondly we need to restore the trade links that have been badly damaged by Brexit. In addition we need to restore the political framework for consultation with the major European powers such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. The best way would be re-entry into the EU, which I now think is a possibility, but in any event we should engage bilaterally and within the European political community starting now. Friedrich Merz will not necessarily be an easy partner either personally or politically for Starmer, but he needs to be first into Berlin (after Macron) and a framework for a London/Berlin entente needs to be put into place. France will have to wait until the political uncertainty in Paris is fully resolved, so Berlin needs to be the first focus.
Reeves tin ear and incompetence should now force Starmer to get rid of her. A left field suggestion for a replacement would be Liam Byrne, who has served in the Treasury and knows where the bodies are buried, but whose "there´s no money" letter crippled his future advancement, so his elevation would make him political loyal to Starmer. He also understands the problem and has published interesting books on entrepreneurship and business (He´s an Ex- Rothschild Banker). If he can get through the inevitable mud slinging at him, I think he certainly has the vision and the skills to control the overmighty Treasury mandarins who have not been quelled by Reeves.
We need to secure the domestic political security of the UK too. No foreign money whatsoever in UK politics. Careful monitoring of subversive propaganda whether online or in other media. Personally I would consider a pretty draconian ban on foreign owners of any UK media. Murdoch will be dead soon, so his baleful and malign influence is coming to an end, but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Most of all I think we need to adopt a less pessimistic, more realistic mind set, Britain is not a poverty stricken hell hole, and we are as a country generally respected around the world. Our economy is turning and we produce more and more of better and better products. We are a solid, open democracy. We are a tolerant and open country largely inhabited by decent and fair minded people. I do not believe that a corrupt braggart like Trump could ever survive our mocking sense of humour (which is why, by the way I still believe that the millionaires darling, Farage, will never achieve power, even if he gains/retains his negative influence). His advance is a symptom of the spectacular implosion of the Tories, not any particular genius of his own.
We now face a serious crisis. We need to stop wallowing in self pity and take practical steps to solve our problems.
And how many of us, with that much power and that little in the way of check or balance, would do any different.
See also: Russia.
The cost of pensions of £169 billion is also unsustainable and as with the the WFP, why should millionaires receive the state pension when it should be targeted to those on the lower income scale
You can predict what each party will do to your hearts content, but change is coming unless of course you are happy to wait for your pension until you are 75+
Europe can't be seen to give up territory under threat of violence, in the same way the UK would not for the Falklands. It's going to be a US annexation or Danish for decades to come.
Ask any serious historian "when was the best time to be born?", and they'd reply "Yesterday."
The UK is a free country (more or less), with a standard of living similar to France, Japan, Canada, and New Zealand. There are much worse fates.
His interactions with victims of hurricane Helene show a different side to him:
https://x.com/amandafortini/status/1882905663699145112
I am very moved by this. Being seen and heard is a deep human need.
He doesn't interrupt her, or exhibit any impatience. He lets her tell her story in its fullness.