This is a pretty good thread illustrating why infrastructure development takes so long. (And it’s nothing to do with quangos; the fault is with the potential hurdles enabled by past legislation, and those prepared to abuse them.)
@SamCoatesSky was expressing his astonishment yesterday on Sky News that the PM had singled out one judicial review applicant to blame for the legal challenges bedevilling infrastructure projects.
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.
He was laughing at the British voter. That is a terrible look.
Laws on the other hand was probably one of the most impressive Ministers from the coalition era. It is a shame he got busted for something that had nothing to do with his competence.
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.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
"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.
Well the previous Government used their Northern Powerhouse windfall for scrapping HS2 to fill potholes in Croydon, which is even further South.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Western Europe is not thriving economically and also has many of the same problems of generational inequality as the UK.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
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.
Yes the triple lock will end at some point, because eventually it would consume the entire economy, and long before that people simply will not tolerate the effects anymore.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Western Europe is not thriving economically and also has many of the same problems of generational inequality as the UK.
Substantially worse problems, in some cases, because several countries’ demographics are further along the ageing and decline curve than ours. Only France has similarly OKish population stats.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
If you are earning 250k why wouldnt you put significant money into a pension and not pay higher rate tax on it now? If you are earning over a period of time, you will quickly accummulate investments on which you pay less tax too.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
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.
I realize we're meant to celebrate racism and sexism now, following the "vibe shift", but I am a hold-out and proud of it. I wait patiently for things to come back around.
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%.
I would like to see a calculation showing £3m income at less than 10% rate.
This is a pretty good thread illustrating why infrastructure development takes so long. (And it’s nothing to do with quangos; the fault is with the potential hurdles enabled by past legislation, and those prepared to abuse them.)
@SamCoatesSky was expressing his astonishment yesterday on Sky News that the PM had singled out one judicial review applicant to blame for the legal challenges bedevilling infrastructure projects.
From that thread: (You might ask ‘how does funding a campaign to sue the government repeatedly’ square with the FIT’s stated charity goal of promoting bus networks. That’s one for the Charity Commission. Perhaps the lawyers take their fees in travel cards)
Well, it made me laugh as I lose money on a series of slow horses.
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.
Not quite. It is more classist and reactionary than that. People - my generation - who object to 'train station' don't generally object to the equally redundant 'railway station' especially when 'railway' is given three syllables. In the end, it's that 'railway station' is found in the novels of Anthony Trollope and 'train station' isn't.
Actually it's quite exciting when surrounded by 'train station' speakers, as they are generally about 40 years younger than me and nice.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
It's just the plastic anorak Haggi (I point you to several sources) that are left really.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
Can I introduce you to Dennis Healey?
As I’ve mentioned before my effective tax rate (not just marginal rate, actual effective rate over my entire income) is 53%. Anyone paying less than 50% doesn’t know they’re born.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
If you are earning 250k why wouldnt you put significant money into a pension and not pay higher rate tax on it now? If you are earning over a period of time, you will quickly accummulate investments on which you pay less tax too.
Some real world data available here for those interested:
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
If you are earning 250k why wouldnt you put significant money into a pension and not pay higher rate tax on it now? If you are earning over a period of time, you will quickly accummulate investments on which you pay less tax too.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
If you are earning 250k why wouldnt you put significant money into a pension and not pay higher rate tax on it now? If you are earning over a period of time, you will quickly accummulate investments on which you pay less tax too.
Because you’re capped at 10k contributions
Fair enough once you get that high but EIS, SEIS, VCTs, ISAs still available.
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.
Yes the triple lock will end at some point, because eventually it would consume the entire economy, and long before that people simply will not tolerate the effects anymore.
Yes, at some point but not now, and not even next year. The triple lock for the time being is a distraction from the cost of higher rate tax relief on pension contributions, which curiously favours the well-paid pundits who bang on about the triple lock, and also perhaps the cost of public sector pensions (and I'm not sure it is town hall cleaners who benefit the most here).
I have a German acquaintance whose job is bat inspector - every time there’s a planning application in his zone of work near Stuttgart he goes and does a bat survey before they’re allowed start work. So it’s interestingly not just a British thing.
He was aware of the HS2 tunnel controversy. Obviously a big story in the Bat inspector world.
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%.
I would like to see a calculation showing £3m income at less than 10% rate.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
If you are earning 250k why wouldnt you put significant money into a pension and not pay higher rate tax on it now? If you are earning over a period of time, you will quickly accummulate investments on which you pay less tax too.
Because you’re capped at 10k contributions
Fair enough once you get that high but EIS, SEIS, VCTs, ISAs still available.
Which give you tax benefits on exit but not tax deductions on investment.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Western Europe is not thriving economically and also has many of the same problems of generational inequality as the UK.
That may or may not be true, but is definitely tangential to the question at hand. I suggest pigeon’s beliefs that the “social contract has collapsed” is hyperbolic.
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.
Yes the triple lock will end at some point, because eventually it would consume the entire economy, and long before that people simply will not tolerate the effects anymore.
Yes, at some point but not now, and not even next year. The triple lock for the time being is a distraction from the cost of higher rate tax relief on pension contributions, which curiously favours the well-paid pundits who bang on about the triple lock, and also perhaps the cost of public sector pensions (and I'm not sure it is town hall cleaners who benefit the most here).
Unquestionably higher rate tax relief needs binning, but so does the triple lock. I agree that it's going nowhere though. The bloody thing is sacrosanct. Nothing short of a full-blown Government debt crisis will shift 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.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
Can I introduce you to Dennis Healey?
As I’ve mentioned before my effective tax rate (not just marginal rate, actual effective rate over my entire income) is 53%. Anyone paying less than 50% doesn’t know they’re born.
Even at my peak I was at 45% effective tax rate, I think you need to get some advice because you really shouldn't be paying a net rate over that level, even without avoidance measures.
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.
There's absolutely no reason not to call them train stations either.
Mindless anti-Americanism is just as bad as what you accuse others of.
I don't think I watch any shows where people talk about train stations, I use the term as its the default term that most people I know use and it makes perfect sense. If you don't like it, get over yourself.
"Fema official ordered storm crews not to help Trump voters"
As the newspaper adage goes, "who the hell reads the second paragraph?"
A Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) supervisor has been fired for telling staff helping hurricane survivors to skip houses displaying signs supporting Donald Trump.
The agency's head, Deanne Criswell, described the supervisor's actions as "reprehensible", saying Fema takes its mission "to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously
"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.
Yes the old "the average driver is careful and competent" myth.
No - they aren't.
The average drivers who blame the cyclist for not keeping themselves safe by wearing Hi Viz are the same ones who drive their cars into lorries, bridges and police cars 50x the size of a cyclist wearing 20x as much Hi Viz.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
Can I introduce you to Dennis Healey?
As I’ve mentioned before my effective tax rate (not just marginal rate, actual effective rate over my entire income) is 53%. Anyone paying less than 50% doesn’t know they’re born.
Even at my peak I was at 45% effective tax rate, I think you need to get some advice because you really shouldn't be paying a net rate over that level, even without avoidance measures.
No, it is what it is. Too complicated to explain. One thing I’m not short of is professional tax advice.
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?
Hmm. The fault is down to a uniparty consensus, caused by a distancing between the elite and the working classes. Hyper-liberals are a part of that, but then again so are people like Peter Thiel, who correctly characterises the techbro side as the Counter-Elite (his capitalisation). So this should be viewed as a class struggle in a gilded age combined with the destruction of the nation-state. Consequently the hyper-liberals are a part, but not the whole, of the problem.
"Fema official ordered storm crews not to help Trump voters"
As the newspaper adage goes, "who the hell reads the second paragraph?"
A Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) supervisor has been fired for telling staff helping hurricane survivors to skip houses displaying signs supporting Donald Trump.
The agency's head, Deanne Criswell, described the supervisor's actions as "reprehensible", saying Fema takes its mission "to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously
A policy inspired by Chump's withdrawal of police protection from those entitled to it who he thinks did not support him?
"Fema official ordered storm crews not to help Trump voters"
As the newspaper adage goes, "who the hell reads the second paragraph?"
A Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) supervisor has been fired for telling staff helping hurricane survivors to skip houses displaying signs supporting Donald Trump.
The agency's head, Deanne Criswell, described the supervisor's actions as "reprehensible", saying Fema takes its mission "to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
Can I introduce you to Dennis Healey?
As I’ve mentioned before my effective tax rate (not just marginal rate, actual effective rate over my entire income) is 53%. Anyone paying less than 50% doesn’t know they’re born.
Even at my peak I was at 45% effective tax rate, I think you need to get some advice because you really shouldn't be paying a net rate over that level, even without avoidance measures.
No, it is what it is. Too complicated to explain. One thing I’m not short of is professional tax advice.
@Sandpit claimed yesterday that there were only a “few dozen” who were violent at the Jan 6 storming of the Capitol. Politico, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/22/trump-jan-6-pardons-regrets-00199743 , says that those pardoned by Trump include “about 600 people who had been charged with assaulting or resisting law enforcement officers, including more than 170 who were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or seriously injuring an officer.”
Trump has pardoned hundreds who committed political violence in his name. He could do so again.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
"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:
"Fema official ordered storm crews not to help Trump voters"
As the newspaper adage goes, "who the hell reads the second paragraph?"
A Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) supervisor has been fired for telling staff helping hurricane survivors to skip houses displaying signs supporting Donald Trump.
The agency's head, Deanne Criswell, described the supervisor's actions as "reprehensible", saying Fema takes its mission "to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously
As I said, who knows how deep the rot goes.
One can never know.
But at the moment, we have evidence for one ex-employee. Canning the whole organisation looks a teeny weeny but like an overreaction.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
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%.
Fair - a small number of people are doing that (not terribly many earning over £3m), but the vast majority earning over say 250k are paying a 47% marginal tax rate which doesn't leave much room to grab more.
Can I introduce you to Dennis Healey?
As I’ve mentioned before my effective tax rate (not just marginal rate, actual effective rate over my entire income) is 53%. Anyone paying less than 50% doesn’t know they’re born.
Even at my peak I was at 45% effective tax rate, I think you need to get some advice because you really shouldn't be paying a net rate over that level, even without avoidance measures.
No, it is what it is. Too complicated to explain. One thing I’m not short of is professional tax advice.
Fair enough, I had a year where my total deduction rate was ~55% but that included an 11% pension contribution for the year to maximise the annual allowance.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
I agree we should improve public services and I am also concerned about inequality. I don’t think that means the social contract has collapsed in this country.
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.)
Spend the money on a bigger monitor. And get a proper arm to mount it on.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
I trust we’re all cooking up some haggis neaps and tatties this evening. I am determined this year that our children will eat it. I used to give them sausages.
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.
Carefully worded; and yet so untrue, when income, and wealth, are looked at as a whole.
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.
There's absolutely no reason not to call them train stations either.
Mindless anti-Americanism is just as bad as what you accuse others of.
I don't think I watch any shows where people talk about train stations, I use the term as its the default term that most people I know use and it makes perfect sense. If you don't like it, get over yourself.
Otherwise you might get people turning up to the police station asking which platform the Reading service goes from.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
I trust we’re all cooking up some haggis neaps and tatties this evening. I am determined this year that our children will eat it. I used to give them sausages.
Re station, where else but a broadcaster would you expec tthem to qualify the word? It might be Rotherham broadcasting station for all one knows.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
And the wedders castrated for the restaurant trade.
Sorry, it's all a bit too esoteric, mathematiocal and economics-based for me these days - I will wait for the next by election - or the Counties - before I make any more predictions.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
When I last checked, we were still some way below average, so can should be able to take an extra 1-2% of national income in increased to support necessary spending, without putting us anything like out of line.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
I trust we’re all cooking up some haggis neaps and tatties this evening. I am determined this year that our children will eat it. I used to give them sausages.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
Alphabet soup speak:
Cultural issues = pretend there isn't a problem Community relations = cover up when the problem becomes serious Lessons will be learned = pretend something will be done when the cover up is exposed
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
This is a pretty good thread illustrating why infrastructure development takes so long. (And it’s nothing to do with quangos; the fault is with the potential hurdles enabled by past legislation, and those prepared to abuse them.)
@SamCoatesSky was expressing his astonishment yesterday on Sky News that the PM had singled out one judicial review applicant to blame for the legal challenges bedevilling infrastructure projects.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
When I last checked, we were still some way below average, so can should be able to take an extra 1-2% of national income in increased to support necessary spending, without putting us anything like out of line.
That is perhaps £30-5 bn.
That's making the assumption that the average is right and being below that is wrong.
What if the UK is already too high and the average is even more too high ?
As I said, Western Europe is not economically thriving and it also has similar/worse problems with generational inequality.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Lowland Bog Haggis. The nearly extinct cousin of the better known Highland Haggis.
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
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.
The howling from medical consultants will ensure that onshore wind turbines are operating at 110% of rated power, 24/7
"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.
Yes the old "the average driver is careful and competent" myth.
No - they aren't.
The average drivers who blame the cyclist for not keeping themselves safe by wearing Hi Viz are the same ones who drive their cars into lorries, bridges and police cars 50x the size of a cyclist wearing 20x as much Hi Viz.
The average driver neither crashes into cyclists nor bridges nor lorries nor police cars.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Lowland Bog Haggis. The nearly extinct cousin of the better known Highland Haggis.
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
But surely no one eats them, the fat content is horrendous.
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.
The howling from medical consultants will ensure that onshore wind turbines are operating at 110% of rated power, 24/7
Well aware my policies will never win an election.....but convinced they would the UK both richer and fairer in the medium term.
If we collectively refuse to make any fiscal changes that leave a group worse off we are dooming ourselves.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Remembering of course the male haggis has its 3 left legs shorter than it's 3 right legs and the females the other way around so that they run opposite ways around the mountain so they can meet for mating.
Gay haggi have a confusing make up of 6 shorter and longer legs.
Trans haggi have all 6 legs the same length and fall off the mountain.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Lowland Bog Haggis. The nearly extinct cousin of the better known Highland Haggis.
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
But surely no one eats them, the fat content is horrendous.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
Your claim of "consuming more and producing less" is questionable. Take universities. The tuition fee has fallen substantially behind inflation. So universities have seen declining incomes.
The NHS has seen increased money going into the system, but it is also doing more. Our population is ageing. Older people use healthcare more. We're also still dealing with the effects of Covid-19.
Haggis – in case the quality has dropped during the cost of living crisis in the same way as many meat pies, it might be as well to arrange some beans on toast.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
The article makes it very difficult to work out what is going on, but it appears that they're actually outside the hotel they're staying at, which is across a field from the school.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
At a guess, this is an example of a on Rome who has zero domain knowledge trying to implement environmental protection.
In that it resembles those stories of numpties DIYing H&S - and banning things in a stupid and childish manner. Which has nothing to do with real H&S.
Real H&S is a *profession* that has reduced the death and injury rate in nearly all industrial settings to a tiny, tiny fraction of historical numbers.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Lowland Bog Haggis. The nearly extinct cousin of the better known Highland Haggis.
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
But surely no one eats them, the fat content is horrendous.
The marsh dwellers had a technique of slow roasting them to render the fat - like goose. The fat actually part fueled the roasting.
Experimental archeologists are attempting to recreate the method.
Haggis – in case the quality has dropped during the cost of living crisis in the same way as many meat pies, it might be as well to arrange some beans on toast.
It's Doggerel Day again, isn't it?
As it happens I have a haggis in the freezer, albeit an English Haggis.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
Unfortunately you get poor value for what you do pay - public services aren't up to much in many areas - and housing costs are horrendous. The existing settlement is still quite good to you if you are an outright homeowner, and especially a retired one. For younger and less well-off people it is rubbish. And the bigger the gap grows between haves and have nots, with the former obliged to rely more on their own resources in areas such as healthcare, the greater the tendency to guard wealth jealously and resent being asked to stump up to help the less fortunate.
As I have said before the biggest problem we have is a public sector that is consuming more and producing less, whether it is the NHS with its appalling queues and hopeless mental health care, education with failing schools and a forthcoming crisis in Universities, criminal justice with swamped courts, ludicrous delays and police who, well, are focused on other things, Social work and social care both failing their tasks and armed forces with more admirals than ships and as many generals as MBTs.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
Your claim of "consuming more and producing less" is questionable. Take universities. The tuition fee has fallen substantially behind inflation. So universities have seen declining incomes.
The NHS has seen increased money going into the system, but it is also doing more. Our population is ageing. Older people use healthcare more. We're also still dealing with the effects of Covid-19.
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
The article makes it very difficult to work out what is going on, but it appears that they're actually outside the hotel they're staying at, which is across a field from the school.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
Yes, but it gives some of us something to get excited about.
I don't need it.
Now going out to work out how to repair my fence, and empty the rainwater barrel before the coming frosts.
Haggis – in case the quality has dropped during the cost of living crisis in the same way as many meat pies, it might be as well to arrange some beans on toast.
It's Doggerel Day again, isn't it?
As it happens I have a haggis in the freezer, albeit an English Haggis.
No partridges, but definitely a haggis.
I was in the supermarket yesterday. I asked an assistant where I could find the haggis. He said “I don’t know. I know where the plant based haggis is, but not sure about the meat version”. I suggested they just might be next to each other.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Lowland Bog Haggis. The nearly extinct cousin of the better known Highland Haggis.
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
But surely no one eats them, the fat content is horrendous.
The marsh dwellers had a technique of slow roasting them to render the fat - like goose. The fat actually part fueled the roasting.
Experimental archeologists are attempting to recreate the method.
Wilfred Thesinger wrote a seminal book on the Marsh Haggis back in the 60s.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
May save that pic for April 1st and the haggis tunnel to stop them being run over on the A9.
That can't be a haggis. Haggis always have one sides legs longer than the other so they can run around hills.
Lowland Bog Haggis. The nearly extinct cousin of the better known Highland Haggis.
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
But surely no one eats them, the fat content is horrendous.
The marsh dwellers had a technique of slow roasting them to render the fat - like goose. The fat actually part fueled the roasting.
Experimental archeologists are attempting to recreate the method.
At least they've worked out how to make the salt needed for the recipe.
At a guess, this is an example of a on Rome who has zero domain knowledge trying to implement environmental protection.
In that it resembles those stories of numpties DIYing H&S - and banning things in a stupid and childish manner. Which has nothing to do with real H&S.
Real H&S is a *profession* that has reduced the death and injury rate in nearly all industrial settings to a tiny, tiny fraction of historical numbers.
Talking of which did @Richard_Tyndall check in all right after the storm?
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
I dunno, I just thought after the revelations of the last 50 years people might be a bit less skeptical about “unfounded rumours” and maybe think - well actually perhaps something is going on?
"Asylum seekers loitering outside school is ‘cultural’ issue, say police Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
You may well be right.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
The article makes it very difficult to work out what is going on, but it appears that they're actually outside the hotel they're staying at, which is across a field from the school.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
Yes, but it gives some of us something to get excited about.
I don't need it.
Now going out to work out how to repair my fence, and empty the rainwater barrel before the coming frosts.
You lost a fence as well as the other one (whoever it was)?
My top tip is a hedge, or wind permeable panels - in my area they are called "Hit and Miss", and are like palisade fencing panels with an extra one on the other side over the gaps.
Heavy and somewhat expensive, but tend to last longer on my first house which is on the top of an escarpment at the highest point in Notts.
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.
Taxation of earnings is not particularly high compared with most of Western Europe.
When I last checked, we were still some way below average, so can should be able to take an extra 1-2% of national income in increased to support necessary spending, without putting us anything like out of line.
That is perhaps £30-5 bn.
That's making the assumption that the average is right and being below that is wrong.
What if the UK is already too high and the average is even more too high ?
As I said, Western Europe is not economically thriving and it also has similar/worse problems with generational inequality.
Not quite. Making a comparison with our peers.
(And I wouldn't direct the bulk of the resources to pensions - things around investment, defence, public realm are perhaps higher priorities.)
Comments
@SamCoatesSky was expressing his astonishment yesterday on Sky News that the PM had singled out one judicial review applicant to blame for the legal challenges bedevilling infrastructure projects.
Let’s fix that 😈..
https://x.com/MichaelDnes1/status/1883068824578334821
Laws on the other hand was probably one of the most impressive Ministers from the coalition era. It is a shame he got busted for something that had nothing to do with his competence.
Residents of Deanshanger in Northamptonshire have raised concerns about behaviour of migrants living in a hotel near primary school"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/24/asylum-seekers-loitering-northamptonshire-school-police/
The North now starts at Gatwick Airport.
Thank goodness the open season on the haggis ends today. The poor creature has been hunted to near extinction. Nigel Farage, at the Glasgow hunt, said it was a British tradition and we should be proud of it at which point hunt saboteurs rioted. Police made several arrests.
Well, it made me laugh as I lose money on a series of slow horses.
Actually it's quite exciting when surrounded by 'train station' speakers, as they are generally about 40 years younger than me and nice.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/bn27.2020.pdf
Headline rates and actual rates vary substantially.
1.Labour 38, Tories 36, Lib Dem 22, Reform 39.
2. Labour 22, Tories 18, Lib Dem 10, Reform 20.
3.7
4. 2
5. 2
6. 3
7. 142
8. 2.7%
9. £120.5bn
10. 1.1%
11. 2.1%
12 168 Rbl to $
13. 4-0 Australia. :-(
Best of luck to everyone else, this is total guess work.
He was aware of the HS2 tunnel controversy. Obviously a big story in the Bat inspector world.
"Fema official ordered storm crews not to help Trump voters"
That would do Times Square.
Mindless anti-Americanism is just as bad as what you accuse others of.
I don't think I watch any shows where people talk about train stations, I use the term as its the default term that most people I know use and it makes perfect sense. If you don't like it, get over yourself.
A Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) supervisor has been fired for telling staff helping hurricane survivors to skip houses displaying signs supporting Donald Trump.
The agency's head, Deanne Criswell, described the supervisor's actions as "reprehensible", saying Fema takes its mission "to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously
No - they aren't.
The average drivers who blame the cyclist for not keeping themselves safe by wearing Hi Viz are the same ones who drive their cars into lorries, bridges and police cars 50x the size of a cyclist wearing 20x as much Hi Viz.
Gangster state...
Trump has pardoned hundreds who committed political violence in his name. He could do so again.
Pause
I know it's not in the same league, but I just wanted to contribute something.
But at the moment, we have evidence for one ex-employee. Canning the whole organisation looks a teeny weeny but like an overreaction.
“Yeah OK they might abduct your kids, but it’s just a “cultural issue””
Honestly, this stuff is going to DESTROY Labour, and guarantee a Reform government
£300 for a 34” Samsung monitor now…
That is perhaps £30-5 bn.
https://scottishfood.co.uk/product/cockburns-whole-haggis-slicing-sausage-1300g/?gQT=1
*entry level*
Cultural issues = pretend there isn't a problem
Community relations = cover up when the problem becomes serious
Lessons will be learned = pretend something will be done when the cover up is exposed
Even when it takes the form of waiting until the last minute to mount a challenge that cannot succeed. Then wanting to mount another one.
All of them insisting they cannot possibly provide even a basic service without lots more of our cash. The result is that private medicine is growing fast, people are scrimping to pay VAT on the money they are saving the taxpayer in education costs, the Scottish government now has prisoners serving 40% of their sentences before release, our navy comprises 2 broken down aircraft carriers we cannot protect and our army would find it impossible to sustain an army in the field the size of that sent into Iraq for more than a few weeks.
It is not a happy state of affairs.
What if the UK is already too high and the average is even more too high ?
As I said, Western Europe is not economically thriving and it also has similar/worse problems with generational inequality.
But the article does include the police saying this: We have had no evidence of any crimes submitted to us, or any verified first-person reports. All reports received at present have been assessed to be third-party reports, primarily based on social media posts and not by people who live in the village.
But you may well be right because such is the power of social media-spread misinformation.
If someone remakes Blake's 7, @Leon would be the perfect person to voice Orac, the waspish, permanently annoyed, artificial, self-declared genius.
https://youtu.be/XCg43omcgZs?t=63
They move on marshy ground by rolling.
The draining of marshes for agricultural improvement wiped out their habitat by the end of the 19th century.
If we collectively refuse to make any fiscal changes that leave a group worse off we are dooming ourselves.
Gay haggi have a confusing make up of 6 shorter and longer legs.
Trans haggi have all 6 legs the same length and fall off the mountain.
I keep seeing wailing headlines, but have not been paying much attention.
The NHS has seen increased money going into the system, but it is also doing more. Our population is ageing. Older people use healthcare more. We're also still dealing with the effects of Covid-19.
One quote is from a parent worried they're going to go on the school field, so it sound like they're actually not going particularly near.
Clearly the 'cultural' comment is nothing to do with the "loitering by a school". It's obviously referring to the fact that it's quite common in lots of countries to sit, or stand outside chatting with friends. Doing so next to where they live sounds pretty normal to me.
The headline is deliberately misleading, which is sadly pretty common with The Telegraph. Long gone are the days, when it aimed to provide serious news from an establishment/right wing perspective.
In that it resembles those stories of numpties DIYing H&S - and banning things in a stupid and childish manner. Which has nothing to do with real H&S.
Real H&S is a *profession* that has reduced the death and injury rate in nearly all industrial settings to a tiny, tiny fraction of historical numbers.
Experimental archeologists are attempting to recreate the method.
As it happens I have a haggis in the freezer, albeit an English Haggis.
No partridges, but definitely a haggis.
How on earth is he supposed to pay the VAT on his kids' fees on that?
I don't need it.
Now going out to work out how to repair my fence, and empty the rainwater barrel before the coming frosts.
https://www.1722waggonway.co.uk/post/2017/12/14/salt-produced-in-cockenzie-once-more
Silly me
My top tip is a hedge, or wind permeable panels - in my area they are called "Hit and Miss", and are like palisade fencing panels with an extra one on the other side over the gaps.
Heavy and somewhat expensive, but tend to last longer on my first house which is on the top of an escarpment at the highest point in Notts.
(And I wouldn't direct the bulk of the resources to pensions - things around investment, defence, public realm are perhaps higher priorities.)