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.
Was that the one about Dundee United supporters (traditionally called Arabs because they allegedly used so much sand to make a pitch playable that it looked like a desert) in Lochee? I am sure they will have consumed many a haggis after a hard day at the Jute mill.
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.
Really?
I thought the last word was “Auf Haggis” - the 27 volume work by Richard Nietzsche, cousin of Friedriche
Popularly supposed to be a product of the descent into madness required of all 19th cent. German philosophers, it has undergone a renaissance in recent years.
The middle section on the types and varieties of wild haggis has been compared to the section on whales in Moby Dick.
True, the mystical sage conversing with a haggis for 12 volumes is a tough go…..
"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.
Ah, but there are no average drivers - they all think they are good .
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.
Really?
I thought the last word was “Auf Haggis” - the 27 volume work by Richard Nietzsche, cousin of Friedriche
Popularly supposed to be a product of the descent into madness required of all 19th cent. German philosophers, it has undergone a renaissance in recent years.
The middle section on the types and varieties of wild haggis has been compared to the section on whales in Moby Dick.
True, the mystical sage conversing with a haggis for 12 volumes is a tough go…..
That's ridiculous. Haggi eat sage, they don't talk to it.
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?
Silly me
No, you are correct. People might well think that, and vote accordingly. I agree, even if in this case it looks as if the reports are social media fearmongering that have nonetheless been checked by the local constabulary who found nothing to see here. And one day everyone's worst fears will come true and three little girls will be murdered while making Taylor Swift bracelets, or schoolboys stabbed or decapitated. This is why KGB-backed trolls do their thing. It works.
"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?
Silly me
No, you are correct. People might well think that, and vote accordingly. I agree, even if in this case it looks as if the reports are social media fearmongering that have nonetheless been checked by the local constabulary who found nothing to see here. And one day everyone's worst fears will come true and three little girls will be murdered while making Taylor Swift bracelets, or schoolboys stabbed or decapitated. This is why KGB-backed trolls do their thing. It works.
History informs us that scapegoating minorities for fictitious crimes never ends badly. No sir.
Pardon me, there seem to be some strange fruit on that tree over there…..
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?
Actually...no.
His last post last night:
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
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?
Actually...no.
His last post last night:
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
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?
Actually...no.
His last post last night:
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
Have to say I did not envy him one bit.
Which rig was it, again?
Not sure he said. He said it was just over 100 miles north east of Aberdeen.
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?
Actually...no.
His last post last night:
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
One of the issues there is that a tool used to reduce the unemployment numbers was to encourage them to switch to long-term sickness, so that needs to be unwound without actually damaging the real long-term sick and disabled.
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?
Actually...no.
His last post last night:
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
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.
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.
TBF He's just levelling up to the same salary as the other university principals. The "going rate" advocates never seem to suggest the others should level down.
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?
Actually...no.
We would have heard if anything had hapoened (I hope). I am sure he's just been busy.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 30/28/15/28 Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 20/18/9/18 Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 7 Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 0 Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 3 Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 2 Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election. 146 UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 2.5% UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). £100 Bn UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5% US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 3% EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 1% USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 114 The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2) 3-2 (Aus win)
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Won't there be a saving from the costs of EOL care being forgone too though ?
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
I agree with nearly all of that and I certainly was not suggesting that the inefficiency and ridiculous priorities in the public sector were solely to blame for the current mess. I do think, however, that they are adding to the problem and have done so significantly more since Covid.
The increase in the pensions bill, driven by a brief spike in inflation should simply not have resulted in increases like that. It is a good example of the reckless stupidity of the triple lock. We definitely need to prioritise on what we want the state to do. Non means tested benefits (and, at a suitable level I include the state pension) need to be eliminated so that the available money goes to those most in need of it. We simply do not earn enough as a country to pay for all the goodies that we want.
"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.
Ah, but there are no average drivers - they all think they are good .
A quick google suggests that the average driver is involved in 3-4 collisions in their lifetime. Interesting stat - I've been in 3 already, but then I have a very high lifetime mileage for someone my age, and one of them was a public good (a rather substantial deer).
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
A shout out for Utilitarianism. What gives the greatest net benefit?
"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.
THanks. That's very helpful as I am just about to get my tame concrete and outdoor works chap to give a quotation for some brickwork repairs and new fencing. I was actually wondering about something of that nature which is common locally, which is probably a warning sign!
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
As I've noted before, Tom Sharpe made that point, satirically, in his novel Wilt. OK, it was back in 1978 or so, so no mobeys and social media was the school toilet wall, but still!
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.
TBF He's just levelling up to the same salary as the other university principals. The "going rate" advocates never seem to suggest the others should level down.
Or indeed the principals of legal firms, or MDs of public/private corporations, or ...
"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?
Silly me
No, you are correct. People might well think that, and vote accordingly. I agree, even if in this case it looks as if the reports are social media fearmongering that have nonetheless been checked by the local constabulary who found nothing to see here. And one day everyone's worst fears will come true and three little girls will be murdered while making Taylor Swift bracelets, or schoolboys stabbed or decapitated. This is why KGB-backed trolls do their thing. It works.
History informs us that scapegoating minorities for fictitious crimes never ends badly. No sir.
Pardon me, there seem to be some strange fruit on that tree over there…..
... (sorry, just realised the reference too late. I think.)
"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?
Silly me
No, you are correct. People might well think that, and vote accordingly. I agree, even if in this case it looks as if the reports are social media fearmongering that have nonetheless been checked by the local constabulary who found nothing to see here. And one day everyone's worst fears will come true and three little girls will be murdered while making Taylor Swift bracelets, or schoolboys stabbed or decapitated. This is why KGB-backed trolls do their thing. It works.
History informs us that scapegoating minorities for fictitious crimes never ends badly. No sir.
Pardon me, there seem to be some strange fruit on that tree over there…..
... (sorry, just realised the reference too late. I think.)
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 32/29/18/30 Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 20/17/11/15 Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 9 Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2 Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 4 Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 3 Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election. 155 UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 2.1% UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). £116 Bn UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 1.9% US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 2.1% EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 1.8% USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 120 The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2) 4-1 (Aus win)
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
As I've noted before, Tom Sharpe made that point, satirically, in his novel Wilt. OK, it was back in 1978 or so, so no mobeys and social media was the school toilet wall, but still!
Yes. Times change but the fundamentals of leaving no trace don't. And since 1978 it's not only phones and social media but the whole DNA industry you have to cope with, and the effects of PACE Act 1984 - which are partly a criminal's charter but has downsides too - have to be dealt with. In many ways worst of all is cameras everywhere where you can't see them. Thomas Cashman remembered to turn his phone off but will have over 40 years to sit around in a cell thinking about the cameras.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
"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.
Ah, but there are no average drivers - they all think they are good .
A quick google suggests that the average driver is involved in 3-4 collisions in their lifetime. Interesting stat - I've been in 3 already, but then I have a very high lifetime mileage for someone my age, and one of them was a public good (a rather substantial deer).
I think another interesting stat is answers to the question:
What do you consider to be an experienced or very experienced driver?
My answers, where I agree with the author of a book I read about 5 years after starting out called "Very Advanced Driving" by a chap called A Tom Topper (really) are basically 250k and 500k miles - by that time a good degree of "roadsense" will have been developed in most situations.
It is very environment dependent - 200k miles in say an undeveloped country with little designed-in safety and poor training such as India, Nigeria or the USA followed by 50k miles somewhere better set up like most of Western Europe, is not an equivalent, as 50k will not unlearn 200k of ground-in dangerous habits.
IMO the UK is somewhere in the middle - we have a quite dodgy road environment but certain things in our favour safety-wise, such as a (theoretical) commitment to system safety and maybe RH driving which deters people who are not familiar.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
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?
Actually...no.
His last post last night:
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
This is what I predicted would happen; I just got the country wrong. If Britain (or in this case, Ireland) taxes American tech and ecommerce companies, then Trump will see this as stealing Uncle Sam's rightful tax receipts.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the 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.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
A shout out for Utilitarianism. What gives the greatest net benefit?
This is what I predicted would happen; I just got the country wrong. If Britain (or in this case, Ireland) taxes American tech and ecommerce companies, then Trump will see this as stealing Uncle Sam's rightful tax receipts.
If we can't tax those companies that hoover a vast amount of money out of our economies then we need to stop buying their goods and using their services. We need to cut US cloud services out of public procurement for starters. Eventually we should aim to be US tech free as far as is possible.
"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.
THanks. That's very helpful as I am just about to get my tame concrete and outdoor works chap to give a quotation for some brickwork repairs and new fencing. I was actually wondering about something of that nature which is common locally, which is probably a warning sign!
It's fairly safe to look at fences in the same position - ie exposed if you are exposed.
What I so these days if I am doing a panel fence is to use things called "post repair spurs", which are things you use to repair rotten posts at the base without demolishing your fence or moving your panels.
The important thing is that wooden posts or wooden panels must never be wet, or they rot - and you get a 7-10 year fence, not a 15-25 year fence. You can use plastic posts or metal posts. or if you *must* use wooden posts, get Postsavers (as used by Railtrack).
Or I put fence repair spurs into the ground - these are 4ft long and give you 2ft in the postcrete and 2ft sticking up. They come with boltholes. Then I bolt 180cm 100x75-ish posts to these clear of the ground, and attach the fence panels of whatever sort to these. That is a fence which will outlast me. They also make removal of a panel easy if you ever need space to get eg a digger through. Slant cut the top of, and cap, your posts.
Or you can go trad and just use featherboard leaving small gaps, either vertically or horizontally.
(I have done a *lot* of fences.)
Here's an example from my garden of my recent technique. The frame in front is support for blackberries.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any 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.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
The Pope may be on board with the idea, but he's not doing much to help himself.
Vatican City has an even lower fertility rate than S.Korea.
As it has a population of 764, mostly Roman Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals and Swiss Guards and a few nuns compared to 51 million in S Korea it is not really much of a comparison.
However the Pope does have 1.2 billion Roman Catholics globally he can address
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
Actually, there IS an easy option, and it's one that both this and the last government took - just raise taxes slightly by enough to paper over the cracks for another year or two, talk about pro-growth policies but don't do anything much, kick the can down the road a few more years and hope that somebody else will undertake the painful Thatcher/Milei-style reforms that people who know any economics are coming to realise will be necessary if this country wants to stop circling the plughole.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Well percentage wise 13% of Scots are Roman Catholic (Scotland hasn't had an established church since the 16th century and that was the RC church), compared to 9% in England and 6% in Wales. Wales also had an established Anglican church until the 20th century
This is what I predicted would happen; I just got the country wrong. If Britain (or in this case, Ireland) taxes American tech and ecommerce companies, then Trump will see this as stealing Uncle Sam's rightful tax receipts.
If we can't tax those companies that hoover a vast amount of money out of our economies then we need to stop buying their goods and using their services. We need to cut US cloud services out of public procurement for starters. Eventually we should aim to be US tech free as far as is possible.
I believe we need a government cloud as in-house as possible. As we have to have these data centres, acquiring practical experience of building and running them should be considered essential.
Please no more hiving the tricky bits off to American conglomerates. Especially as they are so entwined with the US intelligence agencies.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
The real poison imo is that FAR too many of them (not including the Pope, who is necessarily a genuine internationalist) are driving it from a rhetoric which is A driven by fear and B fundamentally racist.
Those doing this include Islamists, Trumpists, and our own Far Right (Tommy Robinson, Collett etc) which then bleeds into Reform UK and the Conservative Right.
There's no need for that rhetoric to be mainstreamed, but Jenrick and the Nat Cons are driven by their own fears, not by looking around and thinking.
They are getting the baggage on their ideology, which they could be escaping - and going down the route of a John Carlisle or Monday Club.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
The real poison imo is that FAR too many of them (not including the Pope, who is necessarily a genuine internationalist) are driving it from a rhetoric which is A) driven by fear and fundamentally racist.
Those doing this include Islamists, Trumpists, and our own Far Right (Tommy Robinson, Collett etc) which then bleeds into Reform UK and the Conservative Right.
There's no need for that rhetoric to be mainstreamed, but Jenrick and the Nat Cons are driven by their own fears, not by looking around and thinking.
There is nothing racist about pushing to get our birthrate back to replacement level of 2.1
Apropos of nothing, been rewatching Stargate SG-1. Holds up rather well I think - in its first season it was pretty ambitious with the variety of storylines, and even things like the direction show more effort than the standard TV fare.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Although the status of the Kirk has always been one where for a hundred odd years everyone has found a little creative ambiguity useful.
What would they know, 300 miles away? They certainly didn't understand Presbyterianism in e.g. the runup to the 1843 split.
Does the Church of Scotland have an obligation to accept anyone who died within the Parish in their churchyards?
Both CofE and CofW do even though the latter is disestablished, and the CofE (for some reason) gets quid pro quos that the CoW does not in exchange for that obligation. One is that the CofE has a right to close a churchyard and hand it over to be maintained in future by the Local Authority - since the obligation reduces the area of Council cemetary required and the associated costs.
"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.
THanks. That's very helpful as I am just about to get my tame concrete and outdoor works chap to give a quotation for some brickwork repairs and new fencing. I was actually wondering about something of that nature which is common locally, which is probably a warning sign!
It's fairly safe to look at fences in the same position - ie exposed if you are exposed.
What I so these days if I am doing a panel fence is to use things called "post repair spurs", which are things you use to repair rotten posts at the base without demolishing your fence or moving your panels.
The important thing is that wooden posts or wooden panels must never be wet, or they rot - and you get a 7-10 year fence, not a 15-25 year fence. You can use plastic posts or metal posts. or if you *must* use wooden posts, get Postsavers (as used by Railtrack).
Or I put fence repair spurs into the ground - these are 4ft long and give you 2ft in the postcrete and 2ft sticking up. They come with boltholes. Then I bolt 180cm 100x75-ish posts to these clear of the ground, and attach the fence panels to these. That is a fence which will outlast me. They also make removal of a panel easy if you ever need eg a digger.
(I have done a *lot* of fences.)
Here's an example from my garden of the technique. The frame in front is support for blackberries.
Thanks. Will talk to the concrete chap and the neighbours. There is actually a part of fence running beside my workshed (on the footprint of an old garage to avoid the need for planning application) that needs to be removable for maintenance so that could be the solution.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
The real poison imo is that FAR too many of them (not including the Pope, who is necessarily a genuine internationalist) are driving it from a rhetoric which is A) driven by fear and fundamentally racist.
Those doing this include Islamists, Trumpists, and our own Far Right (Tommy Robinson, Collett etc) which then bleeds into Reform UK and the Conservative Right.
There's no need for that rhetoric to be mainstreamed, but Jenrick and the Nat Cons are driven by their own fears, not by looking around and thinking.
There is nothing racist about pushing to get our birthrate back to replacement level of 2.1
I haven't suggested there is anything racist about it, however the motivational rhetoric which attaches - "we are being overhwelmed by XYZ foreign group, who may replace us (and so on)" does tip over into racism.
And that rhetoric, in that form, is not necessary, and helps create a tendency to target ethnic groups.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Although the status of the Kirk has always been one where for a hundred odd years everyone has found a little creative ambiguity useful.
What would they know, 300 miles away? They certainly didn't understand Presbyterianism in e.g. the runup to the 1843 split.
Does the Church of Scotland have an obligation to accept anyone who died within the Parish in their churchyards?
Both CofE and CofW do even though the latter is disestablished, and the CofE (for some reason) gets quid pro quos that the CoW does not in exchange for that obligation. One is that the CofE has a right to close a churchyard and hand it over to be maintained in future by the Local Authority - since the obligation reduces the area of Council cemetary required and the associated costs.
There was no automatic right to be married in the CoW Parish church in the Parish you grew up in after disestablishment though until a private members bill in 2010.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Although the status of the Kirk has always been one where for a hundred odd years everyone has found a little creative ambiguity useful.
What would they know, 300 miles away? They certainly didn't understand Presbyterianism in e.g. the runup to the 1843 split.
Does the Church of Scotland have an obligation to accept anyone who died within the Parish in their churchyards?
Both CofE and CofW do even though the latter is disestablished, and the CofE (for some reason) gets quid pro quos that the CoW does not in exchange for that obligation. One is that the CofE has a right to close a churchyard and hand it over to be maintained in future by the Local Authority - since the obligation reduces the area of Council cemetary required and the associated costs.
Dunno, but historically many parish kirks and their buryin gruns were council property anyway and the burying grounds could have transferred straight to the modernday councils. The splits - much more prominent than in the C of E - also promoted the development of non-denominational cemeteries as well. For instance, Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh is where quite a few Free Kirkers are buried. But by 1843 on, nobody much was being buried in the city centres with the sanitary reforms.
The C of S (Established) never had a compulsory monopoly of bmd records, either, or marriages or baptisms. A majority of Scots didn't bother with it on principle (Free Kirks of various names, RCs, Episcopalian) or arsiness or being at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. The fact that the Presbyterians don't indulge nearly so much in sacraments for this and that like the Anglicans and other Catholics do means that there just wasn't the need to do things in church to be legal. Marriage, for instance, was always a civil contract - albeit one often embellished with a visit to the minister's study, or a minister's visit to the house if nice enough, and modified with odd features brought in by English interference because the southerners didn't want to recognise Scottish marriages despite having signed up to that in 1707
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
As you know this is an area in which we disagree. I don't want to stop people having children if they want them but I am not in favour of the state interfering:
a) because I am not in favour of state interfering in anything if it can be avoided
b) the world has too many people and we need to find another way of dealing with the generational problem of the ratio of older people to the young. This is less of a problem than over population.
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
I merely commented if they got caught less it would cost less. Do you disagree?
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
Kirsty Noem is the puppy-killer (I wasn't sure whether she was that one or the childrens'-theater-boyfriend-fluffer - the name sticks), and has a comprehensive resume including COVID denial, and all kinds of MAGA bonkers.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
A shout out for Utilitarianism. What gives the greatest net benefit?
"For the Greater Good!"
Good to have you on board. Welcome to your Leeds to Lancaster service on the Bentham Line.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
I merely commented if they got caught less it would cost less. Do you disagree?
Talking about rape, try asking HYUFD if he approves of abortion for rape victims.
Edit: seriously. It's a particularly important issue.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
A shout out for Utilitarianism. What gives the greatest net benefit?
"For the Greater Good!"
Good to have you on board. Welcome to your Leeds to Lancaster service on the Bentham Line.
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
This is what I predicted would happen; I just got the country wrong. If Britain (or in this case, Ireland) taxes American tech and ecommerce companies, then Trump will see this as stealing Uncle Sam's rightful tax receipts.
Ireland is using their low corporate tax rate to be a tax haven, onshore in the EU.
This has pissed off most of the EU.
The statements in the article could have come from the left of the Labour Party - the practice of declaring profit in the low tax jurisdiction has appeared many times on LabourList etc.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al@TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
The absolute basics about removing fingerprints, use and correct disposal of burner phones, the dangers of images on social media and social media generally for identification and trackability, and when and how not to answer questions in a police station ought to be on the civic and social responsibility curriculum in every secondary school.
I disagree. We don't want to teach people how to commit crimes more effectively. Most criminals, fortunately, are pretty stupid, and that limits their effectiveness.
If we teach criminals to commit crimes more effectively they will be less likely to be caught so overall prison time will drop and the cost of imprisioning them will be less
So they can commit murder, burglery and rape for instance more effectively and not even be caught and imprisoned for public protection?
I merely commented if they got caught less it would cost less. Do you disagree?
Hmmmm - an academic paper beckons.
“The effects of increased professionalism on productivity in U.K. crime”….
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
You're the one who argued that the RC Church had an excessive influence in Scotland compared to England because there wasn't a Protestant Established Church in Scotland any more.
Although the status of the Kirk has always been one where for a hundred odd years everyone has found a little creative ambiguity useful.
What would they know, 300 miles away? They certainly didn't understand Presbyterianism in e.g. the runup to the 1843 split.
Does the Church of Scotland have an obligation to accept anyone who died within the Parish in their churchyards?
Both CofE and CofW do even though the latter is disestablished, and the CofE (for some reason) gets quid pro quos that the CoW does not in exchange for that obligation. One is that the CofE has a right to close a churchyard and hand it over to be maintained in future by the Local Authority - since the obligation reduces the area of Council cemetary required and the associated costs.
There was no automatic right to be married in the CoW Parish church in the Parish you grew up in after disestablishment though until a private members bill in 2010.
Yes - the Welsh Councils dodged a "here's your new park; enjoy paying for looking after it" bullet afaics.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
A shout out for Utilitarianism. What gives the greatest net benefit?
"For the Greater Good!"
Good to have you on board. Welcome to your Leeds to Lancaster service on the Bentham Line.
Meanwhile, in "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" news,
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
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.
Yet another reminder that Government spending is based on legislation which makes it a duty to provide the services.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
Absolutely right. And it will reduce the amount of litigation when people try to hold politicians to their words too whilst judges twist themselves in knots trying to avoid the absurd implications of the empty promises made. A few years ago now I did a series of cases which involved children with very substantial additional needs being sent to private schools at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100k a year. The judges bent over backwards to avoid the promises and duties set out in the relevant Act. It was frustrating at the time but they were of course right to do so.
It's a very real problem that politicians create inalienable rights through legislation, or adherence to international treaties, when in reality those rights ought to be treated as privileges, and/or balanced against other peoples' rights and interests.
A shout out for Utilitarianism. What gives the greatest net benefit?
"For the Greater Good!"
Good to have you on board. Welcome to your Leeds to Lancaster service on the Bentham Line.
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.
I challenge the assumption that inefficiency and mismanagement is somehow a primary driver of the disaster in the public finances that we face. It's clearly not irrelevant, and doubtless in some cases (such as certain high profile council bankruptcies) there has been demonstrable incompetence. But the primary driver of spiralling costs, of demand for benefits and public services, is need. Need driven in particular by a poor dependency ratio and very expensive housing.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
The only thing I would add to that is that the demographics simply aren't that bad in the UK. We are not Japan or South Korea, and they certainly don't explain the massive increases in health and welfare spending.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
The demographics will get very bad indeed if we halt mass immigration. Then we will become south korea.
Not even then. It's genuinely catastrophic, national disaster fertility rates there. To pick a few TFRs:
S.Korea 0.8 (Scotland 1.3) Japan 1.3 Canada 1.3 UK 1.6 US 1.7 France 1.8
VP Vance has the right idea on that, as does PM Meloni. The Pope is also on board as is the richest man in the world
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
As you know this is an area in which we disagree. I don't want to stop people having children if they want them but I am not in favour of the state interfering:
a) because I am not in favour of state interfering in anything if it can be avoided
b) the world has too many people and we need to find another way of dealing with the generational problem of the ratio of older people to the young. This is less of a problem than over population.
For a time it looked like Covid might be the answer to your second point.
Perhaps Sunak's National Service idea, but spent working in a care home rather than learning how to shoot straight?
The sooner the global population starts to decline the better.
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
Comments
I thought the last word was “Auf Haggis” - the 27 volume work by Richard Nietzsche, cousin of Friedriche
Popularly supposed to be a product of the descent into madness required of all 19th cent. German philosophers, it has undergone a renaissance in recent years.
The middle section on the types and varieties of wild haggis has been compared to the section on whales in Moby Dick.
True, the mystical sage conversing with a haggis for 12 volumes is a tough go…..
Pardon me, there seem to be some strange fruit on that tree over there…..
Revealed: The Left-wing Cambridge days of America’s new second lady
Usha Vance spent a year studying for an MPhil in early modern history after being awarded a Gates scholarship
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/25/usha-vance-cambridge-university-gates-scholarship-history/ (£££)
"Got another 6 hours or so before we reach the peak. Once that is over we will be a lot happier. Currently running a bit above forecast for wind speeds and sea states. The rig is creaking a bit but the anchors are holding so we should be okay."
Have to say I did not envy him one bit.
The state pension bill didn't escalate by 14.2% in a single year from 2023 to 2024 because a functionary at the DWP screwed up the paperwork, councils aren't buckling under the weight of demand for SEND provision because some of their office workers are now doing a couple of days a week from home, and not are they struggling with enormous social housing waiting lists whilst trying to find somewhere to put homeless families because whichever poor bloody sod is tasked with managing the mess is failing to work hard or long enough. Shit is collapsing because need outstrips resource, set against the backdrop of an economy which is badly skewed towards the hoarding of assets rather than productive activity, and the redistribution of available wealth upwards.
With the proportion of elderly, disabled and poor people we have to try to look after as an economy and a country, you simply cannot maintain the fiction that it is possible simultaneously to have adequate state provision in all the required areas and low taxes, just by magicking the problems away in an efficiency drive. It is fantasy. You either do everything properly, which would entail a major raid on personal wealth, or you have to argue the case for what types of provision we can afford to do well, from which areas the state is going to withdraw, and who is going to be made to suffer as a result. The country is in the mire and there are absolutely no easy options for what to do next.
There was a debate in Parliament about the cost to the NHS of providing for those wishing Assisted Dying. That did not include the cost of having a judge involved in the decision.
Want to stop spending, then reduce the number of laws and therefore duties.
National Crime Agency was tipped off to couple’s London arrival by US agents monitoring social media posts
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/25/drug-lord-caught-in-britain-after-wife-posted-holiday-snaps/ (£££)
My advice to all wannabe criminal masterminds is don't get married.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform.
30/28/15/28
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform.
20/18/9/18
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025.
7
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025.
0
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025.
3
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025.
2
Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election.
146
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%).
2.5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn).
£100 Bn
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%).
0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%).
3%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%).
1%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB).
114
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2)
3-2 (Aus win)
The increase in the pensions bill, driven by a brief spike in inflation should simply not have resulted in increases like that. It is a good example of the reckless stupidity of the triple lock. We definitely need to prioritise on what we want the state to do. Non means tested benefits (and, at a suitable level I include the state pension) need to be eliminated so that the available money goes to those most in need of it. We simply do not earn enough as a country to pay for all the goodies that we want.
I think health inequality is the biggest threat to UK welfare state. The distinction between those who fund the NHS and those who receive care from it is stark.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform.
32/29/18/30
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform.
20/17/11/15
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025.
9
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025.
2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025.
4
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025.
3
Number of seats won by the AfD in the 2025 German Federal Election.
155
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%).
2.1%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn).
£116 Bn
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%).
1.9%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%).
2.1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%).
1.8%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB).
120
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2)
4-1 (Aus win)
https://apnews.com/article/kristi-noem-dhs-immigration-crackdown-trump-south-dakota-52bf133437d20f4dd6f5284bb751e264
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z3H-BmTISpk
What do you consider to be an experienced or very experienced driver?
My answers, where I agree with the author of a book I read about 5 years after starting out called "Very Advanced Driving" by a chap called A Tom Topper (really) are basically 250k and 500k miles - by that time a good degree of "roadsense" will have been developed in most situations.
It is very environment dependent - 200k miles in say an undeveloped country with little designed-in safety and poor training such as India, Nigeria or the USA followed by 50k miles somewhere better set up like most of Western Europe, is not an equivalent, as 50k will not unlearn 200k of ground-in dangerous habits.
IMO the UK is somewhere in the middle - we have a quite dodgy road environment but certain things in our favour safety-wise, such as a (theoretical) commitment to system safety and maybe RH driving which deters people who are not familiar.
S.Korea 0.8
(Scotland 1.3)
Japan 1.3
Canada 1.3
UK 1.6
US 1.7
France 1.8
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2025/01/i-want-more-babies-in-america-jd-vance-says-in-his-first-public-address-as-vice-president.html
https://www.governo.it/en/articolo/president-meloni-s-video-message-event-la-maternit-non-unimpresa/24223
https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/05/10/pope-tells-italians-they-need-to-have-more-babies-amid-record-low-fertility-rates
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-elon-musk-population-collapse-baby-push/
Looks like Scotland is significantly lower in terms of birthrate than the UK overall
The whole US government feels like a subreddit moderated by a bunch of incels at the moment.
President’s threat to raise tax on overseas companies would blow a hole in Dublin’s national finances
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/25/donald-trump-plan-crush-ireland-economic-miracle/ (£££)
This is what I predicted would happen; I just got the country wrong. If Britain (or in this case, Ireland) taxes American tech and ecommerce companies, then Trump will see this as stealing Uncle Sam's rightful tax receipts.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/is-the-church-of-scotland-established/
Although the status of the Kirk has always been one where for a hundred odd years everyone has found a little creative ambiguity useful.
What I so these days if I am doing a panel fence is to use things called "post repair spurs", which are things you use to repair rotten posts at the base without demolishing your fence or moving your panels.
The important thing is that wooden posts or wooden panels must never be wet, or they rot - and you get a 7-10 year fence, not a 15-25 year fence. You can use plastic posts or metal posts. or if you *must* use wooden posts, get Postsavers (as used by Railtrack).
Or I put fence repair spurs into the ground - these are 4ft long and give you 2ft in the postcrete and 2ft sticking up. They come with boltholes. Then I bolt 180cm 100x75-ish posts to these clear of the ground, and attach the fence panels of whatever sort to these. That is a fence which will outlast me. They also make removal of a panel easy if you ever need space to get eg a digger through. Slant cut the top of, and cap, your posts.
Or you can go trad and just use featherboard leaving small gaps, either vertically or horizontally.
(I have done a *lot* of fences.)
Here's an example from my garden of my recent technique. The frame in front is support for blackberries.
And here is a good thread on Buildhub talking through lots of options in 2020 with pictures. I am Ferdinand.
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/14447-fencing-help/
Alexander VI and other Renaissance Popes really put Pope Francis to shame, in that respect.
However the Pope does have 1.2 billion Roman Catholics globally he can address
Please no more hiving the tricky bits off to American conglomerates. Especially as they are so entwined with the US intelligence agencies.
Those doing this include Islamists, Trumpists, and our own Far Right (Tommy Robinson, Collett etc) which then bleeds into Reform UK and the Conservative Right.
There's no need for that rhetoric to be mainstreamed, but Jenrick and the Nat Cons are driven by their own fears, not by looking around and thinking.
They are getting the baggage on their ideology, which they could be escaping - and going down the route of a John Carlisle or Monday Club.
Both CofE and CofW do even though the latter is disestablished, and the CofE (for some reason) gets quid pro quos that the CoW does not in exchange for that obligation. One is that the CofE has a right to close a churchyard and hand it over to be maintained in future by the Local Authority - since the obligation reduces the area of Council cemetary required and the associated costs.
And that rhetoric, in that form, is not necessary, and helps create a tendency to target ethnic groups.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/jeremy-clarkson-storm-eowyn-tory-b2686264.html
The C of S (Established) never had a compulsory monopoly of bmd records, either, or marriages or baptisms. A majority of Scots didn't bother with it on principle (Free Kirks of various names, RCs, Episcopalian) or arsiness or being at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. The fact that the Presbyterians don't indulge nearly so much in sacraments for this and that like the Anglicans and other Catholics do means that there just wasn't the need to do things in church to be legal. Marriage, for instance, was always a civil contract - albeit one often embellished with a visit to the minister's study, or a minister's visit to the house if nice enough, and modified with odd features brought in by English interference because the southerners didn't want to recognise Scottish marriages despite having signed up to that in 1707
a) because I am not in favour of state interfering in anything if it can be avoided
b) the world has too many people and we need to find another way of dealing with the generational problem of the ratio of older people to the young. This is less of a problem than over population.
Musk joins German far right's opening rally remotely, instructs Germans to stop feeling guilty and reminds them how impressed Caesar had been with German tribes' ability to fight.
https://bsky.app/profile/jwmueller-pu.bsky.social/post/3lgljbzm4lc26
Better still, please STFU and stop embarrassing yourselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem
Edit: seriously. It's a particularly important issue.
This has pissed off most of the EU.
The statements in the article could have come from the left of the Labour Party - the practice of declaring profit in the low tax jurisdiction has appeared many times on LabourList etc.
This is designed to beat BJO to the wooden spoon. But there is a small problem.
Highest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. 28%, 35%, 22%, 33%
Lowest share of the vote in 2025 with a BPC registered pollster in a GB wide poll for each of Lab, Con, LD, Reform. All 8s.
Number of Reform MPs on 31/12/2025. 3
Number of Tory MP defectors to Reform in 2025. 2
Number of Westminster by-elections held in 2025. 2
Number of ministers to leave the Westminster cabinet during 2025. 1
Number of seats won by the AfD in the May 2025 German Federal Election. 100
UK CPI figure for November 2025 (Nov 2024 = 2.6%). 5%
UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2025 (Year to Nov 2024 = £113.2bn). 155 billion
UK GDP growth in the 12 months to October 2025 (Oct 23 to Oct 24 = 1.3%). 0.5%
US growth annualised rate in Q3 2025 (Q3 2024 = 3.1%). 1%
EU growth Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 (2024 = 1.0%). 0.5%
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB). 250
The result of the 2025-2026 Ashes series (2023 series: Drawn 2–2). And here it all goes wrong because if I predict 5-0 to England @Northern_Al @TSE and @DavidL will have me shot. So I'm going to have to go 2-1 to Aus.
Let's hope I can win the wooden spoon. We can't have BJO winning anything.
“The effects of increased professionalism on productivity in U.K. crime”….
Perhaps Sunak's National Service idea, but spent working in a care home rather than learning how to shoot straight?
The sooner the global population starts to decline the better.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.