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.
Yes but in a democracy voters are never wrong.
No, in a democracy the voters have the right to be wrong.
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.
Liam Byrne wrote THE letter. He can't live that one down. Hat tip to David Laws.
Among all the dreary b@stards in the current Government Darren Jones appears to have more about him than Keir the articled clerk and Rachel from accounts.
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.
Lord, preserve us from politicians on a mission to create a "legacy"....
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.
The doomsaying of some people tends to increase or decrease depending on whether they support the current government.
Its noticeable that the 'Britain is broken, nothing works anymore' talk of a year ago has stopped from many people but started from some others.
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.
It is upto the Greenlanders to decide their future, not Trump or Denmark
There is no difference between Greenland or the Falklands, both of which I have visited and are very remote
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.
Its not where you are though its the direction of travel. Things are better than they were in 1950 but are worse than where they were in 2010.
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.
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
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.
In theory you should be able to run the built-in graphics alongside a separate graphics card, but that's a bit hit an miss in practice. If your PC has a pair of PCIe 16x slots you'd probably be better dropping in a pair of standard graphics cards.
I'd recommend using low-end workstation cards as those tend to have the ability to drive lots of monitors. The Nvidia Quadro P620, as an example, is a low-profile card that can run 4 x 4K 60Hz monitors and uses very little power.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
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.
We will wait and see if they remain as high once his tariffs come in next month. That will certainly push up the prices of imported goods in the shops and for suppliers even if it boosts jobs and growth in US based industries
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.
The doomsaying of some people tends to increase or decrease depending on whether they support the current government.
Its noticeable that the 'Britain is broken, nothing works anymore' talk of a year ago has stopped from many people but started from some others.
The reality (which Labour should be exploiting on the 'cup half full and we are making it fuller' basis) is that most people are fairly comfortable and content most of the time.
There is one thing which however is a universal fly in the ointment, and another which is so for a big section.
More or less 100% of the population including the well heeled, rich and famous and posh rely on the NHS for critically urgent/emergency or very complex things, even if they never use it - at any moment they may need it and need it now. This more than anything else is the huge and continuing issue giving rise to 'broken Britain'. When calling an ambulence because the baby/grandma has stopped breathing we are all in the same anxious boat.
The other one is housing costs; this is not a big deal where I am (an unfashionable bit of the grim north where working class people buy houses and the submerged tenth have social housing) but where it is a thing it is soul destroying.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
There was a good mathematical analysis of the triple lock by a poster on here, sorry can't remember who, explaining how the triple lock will always outstrip inflation and wages over time, so it isn't affordable in the longterm. I agree with the universality but disagree with the way politicians have linked pensions and NI. Pensions are paid out of current tax receipts, NI is just another tax on earned income. There needs to be a more honest discussion about all taxes and how social security is funded.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Yes, that one. The other things they should build are the Boris tunnel to Ireland, and a road tunnel under the channel.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
The government is in danger of allowing its homework to be marked by being specific. SFAICS it is now the case that unless work starts soon on 3rd runway and a Thames crossing they will be seen to fail. Some things can hidden or blurred - most can actually. But not these.
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.
The doomsaying of some people tends to increase or decrease depending on whether they support the current government.
Its noticeable that the 'Britain is broken, nothing works anymore' talk of a year ago has stopped from many people but started from some others.
The reality (which Labour should be exploiting on the 'cup half full and we are making it fuller' basis) is that most people are fairly comfortable and content most of the time.
There is one thing which however is a universal fly in the ointment, and another which is so for a big section.
More or less 100% of the population including the well heeled, rich and famous and posh rely on the NHS for critically urgent/emergency or very complex things, even if they never use it - at any moment they may need it and need it now. This more than anything else is the huge and continuing issue giving rise to 'broken Britain'. When calling an ambulence because the baby/grandma has stopped breathing we are all in the same anxious boat.
The other one is housing costs; this is not a big deal where I am (an unfashionable bit of the grim north where working class people buy houses and the submerged tenth have social housing) but where it is a thing it is soul destroying.
You forgot to mention mass immigration. Thats a big one.
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.
In theory you should be able to run the built-in graphics alongside a separate graphics card, but that's a bit hit an miss in practice. If your PC has a pair of PCIe 16x slots you'd probably be better dropping in a pair of standard graphics cards.
I'd recommend using low-end workstation cards as those tend to have the ability to drive lots of monitors. The Nvidia Quadro P620, as an example, is a low-profile card that can run 4 x 4K 60Hz monitors and uses very little power.
Thanks for the reply. Alas, it has only one such slot.
Another option is of course to replace the motherboard, but that’s quite a lot of work.
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
If people got into the habit of saving for their future, instead of spending everything on stuff, they could afford to retire earlier than the state pension age, or at least move to part time working. The feckless can carry on working until they drop.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
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.
100% agree. But psychology matters. 100% of the population are in a state of uncertainty about whether an ambulance will arrive in an emergency (even though it usually does), and the same 100% are in a degree of uncertainty about whether the NHS will be there for them with 100% efficiency and effectiveness when they need it 0even though it often is), even if they never need it. This colours attitudes universally.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
A £9bn project in London.
That must be part of the levelling up agenda.
It is. It’s connecting south London with north London.
Thanks for the reply. Alas, it has only one such slot.
Another option is of course to replace the motherboard, but that’s quite a lot of work.
If you're not using the PCIe 1x slot, it can take a specific 1x graphics card like a Nvidia Quadro NVS295. That, along side a Quadro P620, will give you 6 monitor outputs. The display from the 295 may not be a fluid as a more powerful card, even on the desktop, but it will work.
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.
Despite the way it is often presented, public spending isn´t a pie, it is a river. Increasing domestic spending on defence may not be the most efficient multiplier, but is does stimulate some growth in the short/medium term.
(This is also true of infrastructure expenditure as the Elizabeth Line demonstrates so clearly). So the problem is not an immediate one, unless Gilts holders go on strike.
My personal view is that we need an overhaul of both revenue collection and spending. In particular we need reclassify maintenance out of the short term spending and into the capital account, which would help to ensure that maintenance budgets actually happen. Likewise, ending clawback- that perennial Treasury booby trap- so that local governments can over time build up reserves should also happen. Digitising the NHS numbers and creating a digital backbone for each NHS trust one by one will certainly save money even in the medium term.
As far as line items are concerned, there will be a continuing battle on pensions- we need to increase the overall pensions pot, but creating an endowment cannot happen over night. There could be an intelligent way to fund infrastructure through a national investment fund which might also reduce our dependence on overseas investors and thus protect Gilts and pensions in the longer term, there is a discussion to have here.
The structural problems in education and health are only partly financial, so continuing incremental reform is probably the way forward especially if we can repair local authority finances.
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
So don't means test it, just tax it?
Mods, this post above doesn't make sense. Can you delete it please?
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Yes, that one. The other things they should build are the Boris tunnel to Ireland, and a road tunnel under the channel.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
It wasn't built as a road tunnel for a number of safety reasons, the longest road tunnel is in Norway and about 15 miles long, I doubt it has much traffic. Drivers can't even manage not to have RTAs in daylight and ideal weather conditions, it would just be constantly gridlocked due to stupidity.
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
So don't means test it, just tax it?
It already is - as the state pension has increased it has meant that there has been increasingly less allowance remaining before personal pensions become taxable.
And given that triple lock pensions will rise faster than the personal allowance that process will continue.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Yes, that one. The other things they should build are the Boris tunnel to Ireland, and a road tunnel under the channel.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
It wasn't built as a road tunnel for a number of safety reasons, the longest road tunnel is in Norway and about 15 miles long, I doubt it has much traffic. Drivers can't even manage not to have RTAs in daylight and ideal weather conditions, it would just be constantly gridlocked due to stupidity.
I just assumed it was in case a future Tory PM came in and decided it would make sense to stop the project 6km short of Calais to save costs.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Yes, that one. The other things they should build are the Boris tunnel to Ireland, and a road tunnel under the channel.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
It wasn't built as a road tunnel for a number of safety reasons, the longest road tunnel is in Norway and about 15 miles long, I doubt it has much traffic. Drivers can't even manage not to have RTAs in daylight and ideal weather conditions, it would just be constantly gridlocked due to stupidity.
And then everyone in the tunnel would die from CO poisoning.
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
So don't means test it, just tax it?
Mods, this post above doesn't make sense. Can you delete it please?
That would set a terrible precedent. Below the line would be blank most evenings.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
That is a very good point about the retirement age trade-off, it's created a "club" where the members are steadily improving their own deal and increasing the barrier to entry.
Thanks for the reply. Alas, it has only one such slot.
Another option is of course to replace the motherboard, but that’s quite a lot of work.
If you're not using the PCIe 1x slot, it can take a specific 1x graphics card like a Nvidia Quadro NVS295. That, along side a Quadro P620, will give you 6 monitor outputs. The display from the 295 may not be a fluid as a more powerful card, even on the desktop, but it will work.
Thank you. That might well have mileage in it as an idea. I will look into it.
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.
Except it’s probably more fragile than any time in the last forty years.
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?
I like the five possibles Gideon Rachman lists for international Trumpian outcomes (my single phrase summary, so rather simplified): 1) New great power bargain, Europe loses 2) War by accident 3) Anarchy in a leaderless world 4) New globalisation without USA; BRICS and EU etc at the centre 5) 'America First' succeeds. We all join in whether we like it or not.
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.
Liam Byrne wrote THE letter. He can't live that one down.
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.
The doomsaying of some people tends to increase or decrease depending on whether they support the current government.
Its noticeable that the 'Britain is broken, nothing works anymore' talk of a year ago has stopped from many people but started from some others.
The reality (which Labour should be exploiting on the 'cup half full and we are making it fuller' basis) is that most people are fairly comfortable and content most of the time.
There is one thing which however is a universal fly in the ointment, and another which is so for a big section.
More or less 100% of the population including the well heeled, rich and famous and posh rely on the NHS for critically urgent/emergency or very complex things, even if they never use it - at any moment they may need it and need it now. This more than anything else is the huge and continuing issue giving rise to 'broken Britain'. When calling an ambulence because the baby/grandma has stopped breathing we are all in the same anxious boat.
The other one is housing costs; this is not a big deal where I am (an unfashionable bit of the grim north where working class people buy houses and the submerged tenth have social housing) but where it is a thing it is soul destroying.
Agree, but two things follow from that.
First is that improving healthcare and housing in the reasonably short term are two of the big questions that the new government have asked themselves. You may not agree with their answers, but they have picked the right questions- which is a start.
The other is that, if (big if) pressures on health and housing can be reduced, floating voters are likely to be less unhappy about immigration.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Yes, that one. The other things they should build are the Boris tunnel to Ireland, and a road tunnel under the channel.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
It wasn't built as a road tunnel for a number of safety reasons, the longest road tunnel is in Norway and about 15 miles long, I doubt it has much traffic. Drivers can't even manage not to have RTAs in daylight and ideal weather conditions, it would just be constantly gridlocked due to stupidity.
And then everyone in the tunnel would die from CO poisoning.
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.
Except it’s probably more fragile than any time in the last forty years.
Also with social media the msm can no.longer shut stories down and drive the narrative.
Would Trump wreck Irelands economy just because they are taking all his tax receipts, have opposed him quite loudly, sucked up to Biden and are taking Israel to court ?
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
If people got into the habit of saving for their future, instead of spending everything on stuff, they could afford to retire earlier than the state pension age, or at least move to part time working. The feckless can carry on working until they drop.
But the feckless will then want to increase taxes and reduce spending on those who have worked and saved.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
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.
100% agree. But psychology matters. 100% of the population are in a state of uncertainty about whether an ambulance will arrive in an emergency (even though it usually does), and the same 100% are in a degree of uncertainty about whether the NHS will be there for them with 100% efficiency and effectiveness when they need it 0even though it often is), even if they never need it. This colours attitudes universally.
Which it is bound to do, because we all know and experience the decrepit state of the public realm. For reasons I've already suggested earlier, government neither does everything well, nor some things well and others not at all. It tries to spread inadequate resources around thinly to cover every problem, with the result that most things are done badly.
I've recent experience both of the crumbling state of emergency medicine and of more than one family member having to resort to private insurance, or pay a small fortune out of their own pocket, to jump massive NHS queues for necessary elective surgery. Then imagine how much worse it is if you can't afford to do that and are forced to spend years and years in pain waiting to crawl towards the front of the queue. I'm afraid it's no use insisting that this is a great time to be alive when taxation is heavy and yet public services are frequently crap and getting worse.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
A £9bn project in London.
That must be part of the levelling up agenda.
A bridge would be levelling up but a tunnel has to be levelling down by definition. Unless you are Australian of course.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
There was a good mathematical analysis of the triple lock by a poster on here, sorry can't remember who, explaining how the triple lock will always outstrip inflation and wages over time, so it isn't affordable in the longterm. I agree with the universality but disagree with the way politicians have linked pensions and NI. Pensions are paid out of current tax receipts, NI is just another tax on earned income. There needs to be a more honest discussion about all taxes and how social security is funded.
No you cannot get the state pension without sufficient National Insurance contributions or credits. Credits being a recent addition, you can scrap those and just pay out the state pension to those with enough NI contributions as before
Would Trump wreck Irelands economy just because they are taking all his tax receipts, have opposed him quite loudly, sucked up to Biden and are taking Israel to court ?
Well, he's threatening to invade Panama because they have the temerity to demand he pay the tax he owes.
Wow! Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She’ll be off the air very soon. MSNBC IS CLOSE TO DEATH. CNN HAS REACHED THE BOTTOM. This is a good thing. They are the Enemy of the people!
Donald Trump Truth Social Post 01:05 AM EST 9/25/25
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?
I like the five possibles Gideon Rachman lists for international Trumpian outcomes (my single phrase summary, so rather simplified): 1) New great power bargain, Europe loses 2) War by accident 3) Anarchy in a leaderless world 4) New globalisation without USA; BRICS and EU etc at the centre 5) 'America First' succeeds. We all join in whether we like it or not.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
Only if it leads to excessive borrowing and an unfunded deficit.
If the Triple Lock is funded by a wealth tax or higher income tax on the highest earners or higher corporation tax or by spending cuts in other departments then it would still be affordable even if not means tested
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
To counter that I would cap tax relief on pensions to about a 500k lifetime pot. Beyond that pay tax when earned.
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.
Liam Byrne wrote THE letter. He can't live that one down. Hat tip to David Laws.
Among all the dreary b@stards in the current Government Darren Jones appears to have more about him than Keir the articled clerk and Rachel from accounts.
I think Jones would be regarded as a bit of a lightweight as Chancellor- its too soon for him
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.
If I were in power in the UK, I would sack half (if not more) of the quangos in the UK. That would get a similar doomsday write up in the global press as 'summary sacking of the bodies responsible for upholding environmental standards, human rights, food quality' - but it would still be the right thing to do to save what's left of the British economy. What Trump has done here could be wrong, but I am sure as shit not going to make that assumption based on the Washington Post's opinion, when I'd never heard of these people until today.
Would Trump wreck Irelands economy just because they are taking all his tax receipts, have opposed him quite loudly, sucked up to Biden and are taking Israel to court ?
Trump will fuck up another country just because they looked at him sideways. We have to stop thinking of him as an ordinary decent president (whatever that means) and think of him as a gangster thug, like Putin. Such people strike at targets to cower the others, and if Ireland fits that bill, he will. As I said previously, we don't really have the mindset to cope with America As Armed Bastard, and we need to.
Would Trump wreck Irelands economy just because they are taking all his tax receipts, have opposed him quite loudly, sucked up to Biden and are taking Israel to court ?
Quite. I think UK/Irish relations will get a lot warmer soon. But then they need to- Ireland has just discovered the problem with neutrality is that Russia won´t respect it.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
There was a good mathematical analysis of the triple lock by a poster on here, sorry can't remember who, explaining how the triple lock will always outstrip inflation and wages over time, so it isn't affordable in the longterm. I agree with the universality but disagree with the way politicians have linked pensions and NI. Pensions are paid out of current tax receipts, NI is just another tax on earned income. There needs to be a more honest discussion about all taxes and how social security is funded.
That may have been me, as the triple lock is one of my hobby horses, though analysis might be a stretch. It's simple logic. The three triple lock criteria are the rate of wage inflation, the rate of RPI inflation and 2.5%. The olds get a pension markup equal to whichever value is the highest. It therefore follows that, unless wage inflation runs ahead of the other two markers every single year (which ain't happening,) pensioner incomes must appreciate relative to those of workers over time. Retirees get progressively richer relative to the working population, who are then hit with progressively higher taxes and more stingy benefits and services in order to cover the expense of their own immiseration. It's a one-way ratchet endlessly transferring wealth to the aged and it's bloody mental. In all, a failure of vision by that pilllock Cameron even more profound than blowing up the nation's foreign and trade policy with absolutely zero thought or effort having been put into whatever might replace it.
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
Only if it leads to excessive borrowing and an unfunded deficit.
If the Triple Lock is funded by a wealth tax or higher income tax on the highest earners or higher corporation tax or by spending cuts in other departments then it would still be affordable even if not means tested
The highest earners already pay the highest proportion of income tax.
Do the hyper-liberals ever blame themselves for the rise of people like Trump and Farage, like they should do, or is it all someone else's fault as far as they're concerned?
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.
In case it hasn't been answered you probably want a 4060Ti, they can be had for about £350, less second hand. Handy for basic games if you partake. Just make sure your PSU supports it because 400W (not kW, that is a small power station) might be close to the edge with a dedicated GPU added since the IGP won't switch off. See what your total system power draw is because for anything that can support that number of monitors you will probably need a 550W PSU.
ydoethur asked: "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."
Out of curiousity, why? And why not just get (or build) another computer?
(It sounds like an interesting exercise, though it has been years since I did such things, which would be reason enough for some of us, including me when I was younger.)
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+
If you have paid national insurance your entire life you are entitled to some state pension regardless of income. Even if the Triple Lock is means tested no party is saying they will scrap the triple lock
Its the financial markets which will make that decision whether the politicians want to or not.
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
Only if it leads to excessive borrowing and an unfunded deficit.
If the Triple Lock is funded by a wealth tax or higher income tax on the highest earners or higher corporation tax or by spending cuts in other departments then it would still be affordable even if not means tested
The highest earners already pay the highest proportion of income tax.
Not entirely true as they have more flexibility in how they arrange their affairs, taking income as dividends, using tax reliefs and tax avoidance schemes. A quarter of people earning £3m a year or more pay effective tax rates less than 10%.
Would Trump wreck Irelands economy just because they are taking all his tax receipts, have opposed him quite loudly, sucked up to Biden and are taking Israel to court ?
Quite. I think UK/Irish relations will get a lot warmer soon. But then they need to- Ireland has just discovered the problem with neutrality is that Russia won´t respect it.
The Irish can fuck off tbh after the last few years. No more freeloading.
There is an air of slight panic in Reeves jumping on board all these long-mooted national infrastructure projects and embracing “boosterism”.
That said, credit if they are able to actually move forward with these. I have significant doubts that they have the resolve to do so in the face of the red tape and the push for net zero from Miliband. But let’s see.
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
To counter that I would cap tax relief on pensions to about a 500k lifetime pot. Beyond that pay tax when earned.
So the public sector DB holders get protected while private sector workers end up paying double tax? Jog on.
Do the hyper-liberals ever blame themselves for the rise of people like Trump and Farage, like they should do, or is it all someone else's fault as far as they're concerned?
Very few posters are even American. Why on earth should they be held responsible for American madness?
Much as he is not my choice, in policy and behaviour Farage is closer to Starmer and Badenoch than Trump.
Do the hyper-liberals ever blame themselves for the rise of people like Trump and Farage, like they should do, or is it all someone else's fault as far as they're concerned?
Ask Kinabalu. He seems to blame most of the worlds problems on sexism and racism. Luxury beliefs for a man living in luxury.
ydoethur asked: "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."
Out of curiousity, why? And why not just get (or build) another computer?
(It sounds like an interesting exercise, though it has been years since I did such things, which would be reason enough for some of us, including me when I was younger.)
When I'm tutoring online, I tend to have loads of resources open. A screen with the video feed, then a PowerPoint, plus a paper and a markscheme, plus very often an examiner report, and then a finder window in case I want to hunt out more stuff.
It can be done on three screens, or on tabs, but it's quicker and neater to have them open on different monitors and drag them to the monitor you're sharing the screen of as needed.
I've been using tiling and it has its advantages, but it also is rather fiddly. So I was planning what would be needed and how I could manage it.
5 monitors should be ample, although the idea of six has its attractions.
Its the station you get a train from, of course that's what you should call it.
Just like a bus stop is where you get a bus from, you don't call it a road stop.
There are several types of stops on a road - supermarkets, houses, petrol stations, Churches, car parks, and anywhere you decide to stop, so one needs to be specific. A railway only has railway stations. Hence there being no need to call them train stations. Mindlessly parroting Americanisms is a sign of filling your brain with too much shit American TV.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
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.
I think that better reflects modern life.
Any move towards means testing the state pension will actively encourage people to both reduce their hours and retire earlier.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
To counter that I would cap tax relief on pensions to about a 500k lifetime pot. Beyond that pay tax when earned.
So the public sector DB holders get protected while private sector workers end up paying double tax? Jog on.
Would have similar adjustments on public sector schemes. I just don't see any reason, particularly when we are skint, why we should forego tax now on earned income to provide luxury retirement. A 500k pot plus state pension * gives roughly average wage - up to that level makes sense to encourage independence and saving. What is the logic to forego tax for luxury retirement barring it being the status quo?
* The rich can add another similar pot from tax subsidised ISAs too.
There is an air of slight panic in Reeves jumping on board all these long-mooted national infrastructure projects and embracing “boosterism”.
That said, credit if they are able to actually move forward with these. I have significant doubts that they have the resolve to do so in the face of the red tape and the push for net zero from Miliband. But let’s see.
I was thinking about a Reeves replacement (I don’t think there really is one in Labour's ranks in parliament - not one where the benefit would be greater than the drawback of having to sack the Chancellor), and actually, a more powerful move would be sacking Ed Milliband. Just offer him a demotion in a reshuffle and put someone half sensible in to roll back Net Zero and actually come up with an energy strategy - starting with an industrial energy strategy. That frees Reeves' hands far more, gives a much better chance of a reset, and is just a fairly insignificant flesh wound for the Government.
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.
Liam Byrne wrote THE letter. He can't live that one down.
Why not ?
I know defeated Labour and Conservative Ministers traditionally wrote comedy notes to their successors but Laws was not in that club and was quite rightly outraged, and the Conservatives latched onto it. The Tories dined off Byrne's note for fourteen years. Whatever the tradition the note was unacceptable, no one writes them now.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Yes, that one. The other things they should build are the Boris tunnel to Ireland, and a road tunnel under the channel.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
It wasn't built as a road tunnel for a number of safety reasons, the longest road tunnel is in Norway and about 15 miles long, I doubt it has much traffic. Drivers can't even manage not to have RTAs in daylight and ideal weather conditions, it would just be constantly gridlocked due to stupidity.
I went through this very busy 8 mile long one today:
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.
Liam Byrne wrote THE letter. He can't live that one down.
Why not ?
I know defeated Labour and Conservative Ministers traditionally wrote comedy notes to their successors but Laws was not in that club and was quite rightly outraged, and the Conservatives latched onto it. The Tories dined off Byrne's note for fourteen years. Whatever the tradition the note was unacceptable, no one writes them now.
I know the story. I simply don’t see why it should in itself now preclude any serious promotion.
There is an air of slight panic in Reeves jumping on board all these long-mooted national infrastructure projects and embracing “boosterism”.
That said, credit if they are able to actually move forward with these. I have significant doubts that they have the resolve to do so in the face of the red tape and the push for net zero from Miliband. But let’s see.
I was thinking about a Reeves replacement (I don’t think there really is one in Labour's ranks in parliament - not one where the benefit would be greater than the drawback of having to sack the Chancellor), and actually, a more powerful move would be sacking Ed Milliband. Just offer him a demotion in a reshuffle and put someone half sensible in to roll back Net Zero and actually come up with an energy strategy - starting with an industrial energy strategy. That frees Reeves' hands far more, gives a much better chance of a reset, and is just a fairly insignificant flesh wound for the Government.
Yup, just get rid of Ed Miliband. He's a complete menace to economic growth. Drill baby drill.
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?
Pension Credit is a 'gateway' benefit. If you get it, you can apply for other benefits such as help with housing costs. So there is more of a cliff edge when you just miss out.
Reform (the action) is needed but again you get into the issue of changing the legislation and whether there is the bandwidth in Parliament for these changes since there is so much more to do.
Gives Reform (the party) lots to complain about over the next few years but they are unlikely to get the numbers to do anything about it. Seems they are closer to the LibDems than they would acknowledge - wingers without the means or wish to do anything.
Comments
Among all the dreary b@stards in the current Government Darren Jones appears to have more about him than Keir the articled clerk and Rachel from accounts.
Its noticeable that the 'Britain is broken, nothing works anymore' talk of a year ago has stopped from many people but started from some others.
There is no difference between Greenland or the Falklands, both of which I have visited and are very remote
More seriously, it will supersede, not complement.
Edit: @eek suggests it can complement, depending on the motherboard.
And in their fifties not just their sixties.
As these people will tend to be the higher paid, higher skilled and most experienced this would have a negative effect on the economy.
"Meanwhile Reeves is also expected to signal her support for a £9bn highway and tunnel across the river Thames in east London, which would use private finance to defray the cost to taxpayers."
FT
Is this the mythical Lower Thames crossing project that has been off and on for god knows how many years?
Currently the price of the triple lock is a steady increase in the state retirement age.
How far above 70 that can be pushed is very doubtful.
I'd recommend using low-end workstation cards as those tend to have the ability to drive lots of monitors. The Nvidia Quadro P620, as an example, is a low-profile card that can run 4 x 4K 60Hz monitors and uses very little power.
There is one thing which however is a universal fly in the ointment, and another which is so for a big section.
More or less 100% of the population including the well heeled, rich and famous and posh rely on the NHS for critically urgent/emergency or very complex things, even if they never use it - at any moment they may need it and need it now. This more than anything else is the huge and continuing issue giving rise to 'broken Britain'. When calling an ambulence because the baby/grandma has stopped breathing we are all in the same anxious boat.
The other one is housing costs; this is not a big deal where I am (an unfashionable bit of the grim north where working class people buy houses and the submerged tenth have social housing) but where it is a thing it is soul destroying.
I agree with the universality but disagree with the way politicians have linked pensions and NI. Pensions are paid out of current tax receipts, NI is just another tax on earned income. There needs to be a more honest discussion about all taxes and how social security is funded.
The last in particular would make the UK seem much closer and easier to get to from the continent and would help I think in attracting back skilled EU workers. If they could make the border security in the tunnel a bit lax then that would also “stop the boats” overnight.
I do not pay my licence fee to be subjected to this sort of shit.
It’s an ASUS Prime B450M-A, if that clears it up. The processor is a pretty high spec Ryzen so I don’t think that would be a problem. Thanks for the reply. Alas, it has only one such slot.
Another option is of course to replace the motherboard, but that’s quite a lot of work.
That must be part of the levelling up agenda.
Just like a bus stop is where you get a bus from, you don't call it a road stop.
(This is also true of infrastructure expenditure as the Elizabeth Line demonstrates so clearly). So the problem is not an immediate one, unless Gilts holders go on strike.
My personal view is that we need an overhaul of both revenue collection and spending. In particular we need reclassify maintenance out of the short term spending and into the capital account, which would help to ensure that maintenance budgets actually happen. Likewise, ending clawback- that perennial Treasury booby trap- so that local governments can over time build up reserves should also happen. Digitising the NHS numbers and creating a digital backbone for each NHS trust one by one will certainly save money even in the medium term.
As far as line items are concerned, there will be a continuing battle on pensions- we need to increase the overall pensions pot, but creating an endowment cannot happen over night. There could be an intelligent way to fund infrastructure through a national investment fund which might also reduce our dependence on overseas investors and thus protect Gilts and pensions in the longer term, there is a discussion to have here.
The structural problems in education and health are only partly financial, so continuing incremental reform is probably the way forward especially if we can repair local authority finances.
Drivers can't even manage not to have RTAs in daylight and ideal weather conditions, it would just be constantly gridlocked due to stupidity.
And given that triple lock pensions will rise faster than the personal allowance that process will continue.
1) New great power bargain, Europe loses
2) War by accident
3) Anarchy in a leaderless world
4) New globalisation without USA; BRICS and EU etc at the centre
5) 'America First' succeeds. We all join in whether we like it or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8XJRKs_Zq8
First is that improving healthcare and housing in the reasonably short term are two of the big questions that the new government have asked themselves. You may not agree with their answers, but they have picked the right questions- which is a start.
The other is that, if (big if) pressures on health and housing can be reduced, floating voters are likely to be less unhappy about immigration.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/25/donald-trump-plan-crush-ireland-economic-miracle/
Would Trump wreck Irelands economy just because they are taking all his tax receipts, have opposed him quite loudly, sucked up to Biden and are taking Israel to court ?
I've recent experience both of the crumbling state of emergency medicine and of more than one family member having to resort to private insurance, or pay a small fortune out of their own pocket, to jump massive NHS queues for necessary elective surgery. Then imagine how much worse it is if you can't afford to do that and are forced to spend years and years in pain waiting to crawl towards the front of the queue. I'm afraid it's no use insisting that this is a great time to be alive when taxation is heavy and yet public services are frequently crap and getting worse.
A decision that ‘no bat death is acceptable’ will create an artfully designed £100m structure in Buckinghamshire — after a 12-year HS2 planning saga"
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/revealed-the-tunnel-through-the-woods-which-cost-300000-per-bat-kz7pm2s8m
So I'm going with 'yes' on that one.
Wow! Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She’ll be off the air very soon. MSNBC IS CLOSE TO DEATH. CNN HAS REACHED THE BOTTOM. This is a good thing. They are the Enemy of the people!
Donald Trump Truth Social Post 01:05 AM EST 9/25/25
https://x.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1883040968397713468
If the Triple Lock is funded by a wealth tax or higher income tax on the highest earners or higher corporation tax or by spending cuts in other departments then it would still be affordable even if not means tested
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/25/hope-for-britains-loneliest-bat-after-second-species-member-discovered
As so often the UK story overlooks the fact that this bat (Myotis Myotis) is widespread elsewhere and is unthreatened as a species.
Like IDS, they turned up the volume.
Ideally I would like to upgrade to a four or five monitor setup."
Out of curiousity, why? And why not just get (or build) another computer?
(It sounds like an interesting exercise, though it has been years since I did such things, which would be reason enough for some of us, including me when I was younger.)
That said, credit if they are able to actually move forward with these. I have significant doubts that they have the resolve to do so in the face of the red tape and the push for net zero from Miliband. But let’s see.
Much as he is not my choice, in policy and behaviour Farage is closer to Starmer and Badenoch than Trump.
It can be done on three screens, or on tabs, but it's quicker and neater to have them open on different monitors and drag them to the monitor you're sharing the screen of as needed.
I've been using tiling and it has its advantages, but it also is rather fiddly. So I was planning what would be needed and how I could manage it.
5 monitors should be ample, although the idea of six has its attractions.
* The rich can add another similar pot from tax subsidised ISAs too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsuehshan_Tunnel
There have been fatal accidents, though not many - and this is a tunnel with fire supression and monitoring systems below western standards.
Passport control much more of a discincentive than having to drive your car onto a train after a short wait I would have thought.
I simply don’t see why it should in itself now preclude any serious promotion.
Reform (the action) is needed but again you get into the issue of changing the legislation and whether there is the bandwidth in Parliament for these changes since there is so much more to do.
Gives Reform (the party) lots to complain about over the next few years but they are unlikely to get the numbers to do anything about it. Seems they are closer to the LibDems than they would acknowledge - wingers without the means or wish to do anything.