So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
If we accept America is Rome moving from Republic to Empire than Greenland and Canada etc make total sense
if the USA can somehow seize Greenland and persuade Canada into the fold then it has a totally impregnable position, it is North America, and ownership of the mineral wealth of Canada and Greenland means it cannot be menaced by China in any form
We should probably join. It is time for an Anglosphere. The Five Eyes as a nation would boss the world, which would be fun, especially after I’ve done 39 minutes on the elliptical
Utter bollox, there speaks a quisling shit scared cowardly arse.
You're holding back a bit there Malc... he's much worse than that.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
If we accept America is Rome moving from Republic to Empire than Greenland and Canada etc make total sense
if the USA can somehow seize Greenland and persuade Canada into the fold then it has a totally impregnable position, it is North America, and ownership of the mineral wealth of Canada and Greenland means it cannot be menaced by China in any form
We should probably join. It is time for an Anglosphere. The Five Eyes as a nation would boss the world, which would be fun, especially after I’ve done 39 minutes on the elliptical
Utter bollox, there speaks a quisling shit scared cowardly arse.
You're holding back a bit there Malc... he's much worse than that.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 37m Trump’s Defence Secretary: “Just to be clear, you lot aren’t our priority any more”
Trump’s British supporters: “Isn’t Trump great!!!”,
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
The triple lock should have gone immediately. Pick one measure as comparator and go with it.
You'll get no argument from me on that specific point, but that ship has already sailed. The one remote chance that this Government had of scrapping it without self-combusting was at the very outset, where they could've attempted to reason with the public that the nation was in an even worse mess than they realised and that the guarantee was simply unaffordable. Instead they left it untouched and did the same thing that any other likely alternative would've done, which is to raid earned incomes to pay for it (on this occasion, via National Insurance.) And once all that money's gone there'll be another raid on wages. And another. And another.
The notion of any of this changing under any likely future administration - save in the event of a strike by Britain's creditors - is nil.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
I wonder if the whole Musk thing affected Farage more than anyone realized and it messed with his head in quite a serious way.
He's recognised it's a weakness and is moving to hive it off? The British public are very pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin and knows that being seen as a quisling is the one thing that can hurt him with a certain kind of voter who likes Reform on other issues.
That's ominous. Vlad will chew Trump up and spit him out. We're talking an ex-KGB man against a game-show host here.
As awful as Trump is, he is dangerous as well as stupid. We need to set aside 5% of GDP for defence. We need to treat the USA as an enemy and a threat, not just Russia. The two of them will be happy to gang up together to destroy Europe, including the UK. They won’t think that, just because of Brexit, we are no longer European.
So are we going to close down their bases and kick out their multinationals?
If UK grows a pair but more likely to be butt kissing
Farage isn’t stupid. If he wants to win the next election he’s got to strike a delicate balance. I think people have more of an affinity for Ukraine here than the US does.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
Yes.
Still, a sinner repented, and all that.
There are lots of moving part in play, and Farage's influence of course over Ukraine is precisely nil. But, while I may be wrong as things change so fast, if Farage is serious about participation in UK government or even Reform being a serious presence in parliament, he needs to be clearly distanced from Trumpism as it is now becoming, with great speed.
We may have to live with an authoritarian semi fascist USA - we shall see - but there is no evidence that even quite rightish voters in the UK have any fondness for the real article.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Well said.
The other issue with cutting benefits is that it immediately causes a recession because every penny of UC is pumped straight back into the economy. State pensions: not so much.
However, the answer is: - Apply NI to all earnings, including pensions and investment income - 0.5% Wealth Tax
On the other hand, the slapper who does the pron videos, she has an amazing PR/marketing team. Even the BBC can't help but mention her on a regular basis.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
Yes.
Still, a sinner repented, and all that.
There are lots of moving part in play, and Farage's influence of course over Ukraine is precisely nil. But, while I may be wrong as things change so fast, if Farage is serious about participation in UK government or even Reform being a serious presence in parliament, he needs to be clearly distanced from Trumpism as it is now becoming, with great speed.
We may have to live with an authoritarian semi fascist USA - we shall see - but there is no evidence that even quite rightish voters in the UK have any fondness for the real article.
Except Leon, LuckyGuy and WilliamGlenn. So that's a fair proportion of Rightists if PB is representative (which it's not ofc).
No alcohol will be allowed at the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, says the country's ambassador to the United Kingdom. In an interview on LBC, Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al Saud said alcohol would not be sold anywhere during the tournament, including hotels.
However items two and three are fundamentally dumb.
Battery storage systems are no more dangerous than any other system of concentrated energy storage. Ultimately, if you store a lot of energy in one place, then there are risks associated with that: and that's true whether your energy is battery or hydrocarbons or uranium (or even water). If you want to impose additional safety restrictions, go for it. But banning battery storage (which can only reduce energy bills) on the basis they are "dangerous" is (sorry to repeat myself) dumb beyond belief.
I'm not even going to comment on the last one: it's simply an attempt to price wind out the market because... because... Just dumb.
If we accept America is Rome moving from Republic to Empire than Greenland and Canada etc make total sense
if the USA can somehow seize Greenland and persuade Canada into the fold then it has a totally impregnable position, it is North America, and ownership of the mineral wealth of Canada and Greenland means it cannot be menaced by China in any form
We should probably join. It is time for an Anglosphere. The Five Eyes as a nation would boss the world, which would be fun, especially after I’ve done 39 minutes on the elliptical
Utter bollox, there speaks a quisling shit scared cowardly arse.
Leon doesn’t spend long enough at home to care which country he is in.
Labour’s long-awaited industrial strategy will not now be published until June, while ministers will bring forward plans for individual sectors in a bid to show they are working to kickstart growth, it has emerged.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
Jeez, that's a nasty suggestion. It's tough enough being old as it is, without having to endure the thought of eyebrows being raised as to why you haven't done the decent thing and 'opted out'.
Why don't we adopt Carnegie's philosophy: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced” and just let the state take all the wealth an individual hasn't disposed of in her or her life.
Inheritance is a cancer on society - it feeds the 'something for nothing' society.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
That option might also change behaviour in counterproductive ways. Why not run up massive debt having a good time before you take the pill?
Back to the Leon challenge re Trump - if you think he's that bad why wouldn't you consider someone assassinating him, and my fatalist reply 'by the time you know he's THAT bad (not yet with his mandate to be pretty bloody terrible), it'll be too late'. You would just have to hope the love of lost democracy is strong enough in the US that things would eventually turn.
Any lover of US democracy should stay their hand for a good time yet.
I cannot, of course, speak for lovers of Ukrainian democracy.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
That option might also change behaviour in counterproductive ways. Why not run up massive debt having a good time before you take the pill?
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Their basic problem is that they want the rhetoric on a drastic cut to immigration (it will fall somewhat under Lab anyway) without the costs. Reform can promise the world safe in the knowledge that a) are the insurgents so can go a bit out there on stuff without so much scrutiny b) If they did get in it would be their main (only?) priority so would be willing to bear the costs of changing our economic and social model to do without migration.
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
It is now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer. The precise level of that drain varies from estimate to estimate, but it follows that a significant reduction, especially in low skilled migrants with poor english, would be a net boost to the economy.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Their basic problem is that they want the rhetoric on a drastic cut to immigration (it will fall somewhat under Lab anyway) without the costs. Reform can promise the world safe in the knowledge that a) are the insurgents so can go a bit out there on stuff without so much scrutiny b) If they did get in it would be their main (only?) priority so would be willing to bear the costs of changing our economic and social model to do without migration.
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
It is now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer. The precise level of that drain varies from estimate to estimate, but it follows that a significant reduction, especially in low skilled migrants with poor english, would be a net boost to the economy.
It is not now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
What's your calculation for convicts and illegals? Both are groups worth far less than nice old granny who helps with the childcare.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
If you 'cancel the PIP' there would be no point in reigning (sic) in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, just saying.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Their basic problem is that they want the rhetoric on a drastic cut to immigration (it will fall somewhat under Lab anyway) without the costs. Reform can promise the world safe in the knowledge that a) are the insurgents so can go a bit out there on stuff without so much scrutiny b) If they did get in it would be their main (only?) priority so would be willing to bear the costs of changing our economic and social model to do without migration.
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
It is now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer. The precise level of that drain varies from estimate to estimate, but it follows that a significant reduction, especially in low skilled migrants with poor english, would be a net boost to the economy.
It is not now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer.
It is now widely acknowledged that if you start any proposition with the words "it is now widely acknowledged" then everyone is required to accept your premise.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
What's your calculation for convicts and illegals? Both are groups worth far less than nice old granny who helps with the childcare.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
I wonder if the whole Musk thing affected Farage more than anyone realized and it messed with his head in quite a serious way.
That, and Boris getting a seat in at the inauguration while Nigel was left in the cold.
He surely understands now that Donald was playing him all along?
Do we actually have any evidence that Nigel Farage was in any way snubbed during the inauguration, other than the unmistakable sillhouette of the Boris Barnet somewhere in the cheap seats? It seems a hell of a reach on the basis of no actual information.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
I wonder if the whole Musk thing affected Farage more than anyone realized and it messed with his head in quite a serious way.
You think it could be the making of him?
Farage whilst a basically untrustworthy person isn't actually stupid. In fact when compared to Trump Farage looks like a genius. So it's possible that Farage has twigged that being too closely associated with Trump, who appears to have decided that democracy was what thwarted his barmy plans in the previous Presidency, might not be a good thing for his own ambitions.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
If you slash child benefit, then even fewer kids will be born, and you worsen public finances significantly in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
That option might also change behaviour in counterproductive ways. Why not run up massive debt having a good time before you take the pill?
That's fine: lender beware and all that.
Ok, so now nobody over 60 is getting a loan either in your brave new world.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Their basic problem is that they want the rhetoric on a drastic cut to immigration (it will fall somewhat under Lab anyway) without the costs. Reform can promise the world safe in the knowledge that a) are the insurgents so can go a bit out there on stuff without so much scrutiny b) If they did get in it would be their main (only?) priority so would be willing to bear the costs of changing our economic and social model to do without migration.
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
It is now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer. The precise level of that drain varies from estimate to estimate, but it follows that a significant reduction, especially in low skilled migrants with poor english, would be a net boost to the economy.
It is not now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer.
Lucky widely acknowledges it, and that's enough for him.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
Correct. Very hard to get PIP on mental grounds these days (severe learning disability excepted). And DWP review such cases every 3-4 years then routine cancel PIP and await a Tribunal appeal... which quite obviously most people with severe anxiety/depression cannot face.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
PIP doesn't sign you off.
I never said signed off as not working, I said they are signed off as unable to do things in life they can, which is a different matter.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
PIP doesn't sign you off.
I never said signed off as not working, I said they are signed off as unable to do things in life they can, which is a different matter.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
TBF what you said was also "Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP."
Failed asylum seeker can stay in UK – because she joined terror group
The Nigerian woman, who was granted anonymity, submitted eight different appeals against a rejection of her right to remain in the UK. They ranged from claims under ECHR Article Eight, which guarantees a right to a family life, to assertions she was a victim of trafficking.
They were all rejected over a 10-year period.
In her ninth appeal, she claimed she faced persecution if she returned to Nigeria due to her membership of IPOB and her attendance at its protests, rallies and campaigns. She said protesters at the Nigerian high commission were photographed and potentially watched on CCTV.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
I wonder if the whole Musk thing affected Farage more than anyone realized and it messed with his head in quite a serious way.
That, and Boris getting a seat in at the inauguration while Nigel was left in the cold.
He surely understands now that Donald was playing him all along?
Do we actually have any evidence that Nigel Farage was in any way snubbed during the inauguration, other than the unmistakable sillhouette of the Boris Barnet somewhere in the cheap seats? It seems a hell of a reach on the basis of no actual information.
Didn't Co-President Musk call for a new Reform leader?
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Their basic problem is that they want the rhetoric on a drastic cut to immigration (it will fall somewhat under Lab anyway) without the costs. Reform can promise the world safe in the knowledge that a) are the insurgents so can go a bit out there on stuff without so much scrutiny b) If they did get in it would be their main (only?) priority so would be willing to bear the costs of changing our economic and social model to do without migration.
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
It is now widely acknowledged that migration is a net drain on the exchequer. The precise level of that drain varies from estimate to estimate, but it follows that a significant reduction, especially in low skilled migrants with poor english, would be a net boost to the economy.
Widely acknowledged by who? Not the treasury or OBR. Nor the University of Oxford's migration studies. Some types of immigration have a negative impact, so it depends to some extent how, why and where people are coming from. As it stands figures have it as a slight net positive - though one can accept it's not a huge boost to GDP - though certain changes to rules can increase that, e.g. banning dependents.
The problem though lies in how it would disproportionately hit certain sectors. If you want lots of universities to go bust, or councils to get in even bigger debt funding social care in the short term, then that's what you're going for. Which is fine, perhaps we should ditch our current model as dysfunctional - but you then have to take the hit and politicians know that'll make you very unpopular.
And the point is that let's say, for the sake of argument, you are right - the previous Tory government were *not* working to your assumption as their own spending plans assumed high migration numbers even as they made immigration a campaigning issue!
That's ominous. Vlad will chew Trump up and spit him out. We're talking an ex-KGB man against a game-show host here.
As awful as Trump is, he is dangerous as well as stupid. We need to set aside 5% of GDP for defence. We need to treat the USA as an enemy and a threat, not just Russia. The two of them will be happy to gang up together to destroy Europe, including the UK. They won’t think that, just because of Brexit, we are no longer European.
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
But nuance is necessary; the US is not just Trump. We cannot, and should not throw away a century of friendship. At least for now, anyway.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
PIP doesn't sign you off.
I never said signed off as not working, I said they are signed off as unable to do things in life they can, which is a different matter.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
TBF what you said was also "Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP."
Yes, I know people who are doing that.
Optimal solution if you want to game the system, as I've often said, is work 16 hours on the books, get benefits, and work cash in hand beyond that. If you can get PIP on top, even better.
One thing Cameron got right was not carrying out reshuffles unless absolutely forced to do so. Blair was far too keen to move people around, and since Cameron its been a constant merry-go-round. You don't get anything done if you shift minsters every year as it takes time to understand the role, your team, make a plan.
No successful business chops and changes senior management every year. Tim Apple, Nvidia, etc.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
I wonder if the whole Musk thing affected Farage more than anyone realized and it messed with his head in quite a serious way.
That, and Boris getting a seat in at the inauguration while Nigel was left in the cold.
He surely understands now that Donald was playing him all along?
Do we actually have any evidence that Nigel Farage was in any way snubbed during the inauguration, other than the unmistakable sillhouette of the Boris Barnet somewhere in the cheap seats? It seems a hell of a reach on the basis of no actual information.
Didn't Co-President Musk call for a new Reform leader?
Musk was walking back his rash commitment to pay $100 million to a party which has its own billionaire treasurer, and who couldn't spend it anyway.
The really stupid thing is that another year of war and there would have been a good chance that Russia's economy finally buckles and the aftershock may even have swept Putin from office.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
If anything the US under Trump is a bigger problem than our longer-term enemies because he is so unpredictable.
So far we've seen Trump talking about seizing the Panama canal, taking over Greenland, incorporating Canada as the 51st state, designating cartels as terrorist groups to allow military intervention in Mexico, buying Gaza and expelling the Palestinians with no right to return, and many other extreme ideas within the US itself. In none of these cases does Trump seem to have discussed these ideas with the countries they apply to first, and the wishes of the governments and citizens do not appear to concern him at all. This is all completely unprecedented, and actions more like those of a rogue state with a crazed dictator leading it.
So the US may not be the enemy of the UK today, but it wouldn't take much action along the lines that Trump has mooted to make the US a de facto adversary.
That's ominous. Vlad will chew Trump up and spit him out. We're talking an ex-KGB man against a game-show host here.
As awful as Trump is, he is dangerous as well as stupid. We need to set aside 5% of GDP for defence. We need to treat the USA as an enemy and a threat, not just Russia. The two of them will be happy to gang up together to destroy Europe, including the UK. They won’t think that, just because of Brexit, we are no longer European.
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
But nuance is necessary; the US is not just Trump. We cannot, and should not throw away a century of friendship. At least for now, anyway.
I can just see us gradually drifting apart over time - a big reason it was rational to tie ourselves to America in many ways was because of the security guarantees it gave. If that no longer applies we will need to look elsewhere and the US might not be happy with the results.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
You obviously haven't been watching the news lately. It's the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing after years of subjugation.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
The really stupid thing is that another year of war and there would have been a good chance that Russia's economy finally buckles and the aftershock may even have swept Putin from office.
I don't think Ukraine can afford it either. In addition to running out of fit young men, it seems costs are now really starting to hurt.
Apart from stopping the death and suffering, another benefit to ending the fighting in Ukraine is that it is increasingly unaffordable.
Despite international help, the Ukrainian government has increased a range of taxes to help fund the fight against Russia. Last month brought an increase in the military levy that individuals pay on their wages; other tax increases have been imposed on alcohol, tobacco and banks.
Despite the government estimating that the economy grew about 3.6% last year, it's still smaller than it was before the war started in 2022. And this year’s budget allocates more money than ever for defence & security, almost $54bn – which is about 26% of the entire economy. By comparison, Russia is forecast to spend about 6.7% of its GDP on defence.
Russia’s attacks on energy infrastructure have led to rolling blackouts and made it hard for businesses to be productive and pay taxes. With inflation running at an annualised 12.9%, the economy is another major battle front for President Zelensky’s government to fight on.
No alcohol will be allowed at the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, says the country's ambassador to the United Kingdom. In an interview on LBC, Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al Saud said alcohol would not be sold anywhere during the tournament, including hotels.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
You obviously haven't been watching the news lately. It's the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing after years of subjugation.
Yes what Hamas have threatened the Israelis with for years is now being reflected back upon the Palestinians, and suddenly now you're horrified.
Except the Israelis are still being threatened with it too.
And there's plenty of other Muslim states the Palestinians could seek refuge in, there's zero other Jewish ones.
Either Hamas surrender unconditionally, or they need to be destroyed. It was true after the atrocity in October and it's still true today.
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
If anything the US under Trump is a bigger problem than our longer-term enemies because he is so unpredictable.
So far we've seen Trump talking about seizing the Panama canal, taking over Greenland, incorporating Canada as the 51st state, designating cartels as terrorist groups to allow military intervention in Mexico, buying Gaza and expelling the Palestinians with no right to return, and many other extreme ideas within the US itself. In none of these cases does Trump seem to have discussed these ideas with the countries they apply to first, and the wishes of the governments and citizens do not appear to concern him at all. This is all completely unprecedented, and actions more like those of a rogue state with a crazed dictator leading it.
So the US may not be the enemy of the UK today, but it wouldn't take much action along the lines that Trump has mooted to make the US a de facto adversary.
He's not even discussing his mad ideas with his own close aides first judging by the look on Rubio's face in recent days.
I have a feeling he is going to be the first one to walk.
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
That is very plainly untrue. The UK, along with Germany and France, is a major producer of weaponry. *If we have the will* clearly we can ramp up production.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
PIP doesn't sign you off.
I never said signed off as not working, I said they are signed off as unable to do things in life they can, which is a different matter.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
TBF what you said was also "Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP."
Yes, I know people who are doing that.
Optimal solution if you want to game the system, as I've often said, is work 16 hours on the books, get benefits, and work cash in hand beyond that. If you can get PIP on top, even better.
If you know anyone doing that you should report them.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Where will we build them?
"Bathgate no more Linwood no more Methil no more Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
That is very plainly untrue. The UK, along with Germany and France, is a major producer of weaponry. *If we have the will* clearly we can ramp up production.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
If anything the US under Trump is a bigger problem than our longer-term enemies because he is so unpredictable.
So far we've seen Trump talking about seizing the Panama canal, taking over Greenland, incorporating Canada as the 51st state, designating cartels as terrorist groups to allow military intervention in Mexico, buying Gaza and expelling the Palestinians with no right to return, and many other extreme ideas within the US itself. In none of these cases does Trump seem to have discussed these ideas with the countries they apply to first, and the wishes of the governments and citizens do not appear to concern him at all. This is all completely unprecedented, and actions more like those of a rogue state with a crazed dictator leading it.
So the US may not be the enemy of the UK today, but it wouldn't take much action along the lines that Trump has mooted to make the US a de facto adversary.
He's not even discussing his mad ideas with his own close aides first judging by the look on Rubio's face in recent days.
I have a feeling he is going to be the first one to walk.
None of those who lined up with him this time could have been under any illusions about what he would be like or be surprised by anything he might say. I will frankly be astonished if any of them find there are lines required of them they are not willing to cross - what did they expect?
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
That really isn't true. I knew lots of traditional Labour and Liberal voters in 1970 who lent their votes to Ted. Harold was quite a divisive figure and the print media hated him (not least because he had won two elections) It might of course have been Ted's stance on joining the Common Market. For that alone I'd have voted for him if I'd had a vote aged eight. Wasn't so keen on his Education Secretary mind.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
You obviously haven't been watching the news lately. It's the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing after years of subjugation.
Yes what Hamas have threatened the Israelis with for years is now being reflected back upon the Palestinians, and suddenly now you're horrified.
Except the Israelis are still being threatened with it too.
And there's plenty of other Muslim states the Palestinians could seek refuge in, there's zero other Jewish ones.
Either Hamas surrender unconditionally, or they need to be destroyed. It was true after the atrocity in October and it's still true today.
If the Americans invaded England and told you you had to live in a tent in a refugee camp in Wales you'd have something to say about it.
What your clown Trump has done is green lighted Bibi to kill.or displace 2 million Palestinians through a process of ethnic cleansing. True, you might eradicate 30,000 Hamas fighters, but the ones living in Doha remain in clover cooking up retribution across the globe.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Wow that's four really stupid policies. Did Trump come up with those?
The US is not our enemy. But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
If anything the US under Trump is a bigger problem than our longer-term enemies because he is so unpredictable.
You might not always like them as allies, they might screw you over a bit, but at our level at least we ultimately knew we would remain tight?
Trump, being very transactional on an immediate basis, presumably will go out of his way to say no-one can rely on the USA, no matter past connections or alliances.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
So, you've gone back to supporting ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. What credo can support such a position? You cannot believe in property rights, in the rule of law, in individual liberty. Why is it fine to throw all those away when it's the Palestinians?
I don't support it, but if Hamas won't lay down their arms and surrender, it might be the least worst option.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
There have been hundreds of wars in history. We didn't need ethnic cleansing to end 99% of them. Why on earth would it be the "least worst option" here?
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Ethnic cleansing has ended a lot of conflicts. War in Europe in the 40s ended with a lot of it happening.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
The Palestinians are fighting, almost certainly in vain, for their very survival. There is nothing they can do to escape from subjugation or annihilation by the Israelis, so I guess they figure they may as well go down fighting. Much like the Native Americans to European settlers or the British Celts to the Romans.
The Israelis are the ones fighting for their survival. If they don't stop Hamas, they will gladly kill every Jew "from the river to the sea". If Israel lays down its arms, they and the only Jewish state on the entire planet die.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
You obviously haven't been watching the news lately. It's the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing after years of subjugation.
Yes what Hamas have threatened the Israelis with for years is now being reflected back upon the Palestinians, and suddenly now you're horrified.
Except the Israelis are still being threatened with it too.
And there's plenty of other Muslim states the Palestinians could seek refuge in, there's zero other Jewish ones.
Either Hamas surrender unconditionally, or they need to be destroyed. It was true after the atrocity in October and it's still true today.
If the Americans invaded England and told you you had to live in a tent in a refugee camp in Wales you'd have something to say about it.
What your clown Trump has done is green lighted Bibi to kill.or displace 2 million Palestinians through a process of ethnic cleansing. True, you might eradicate 30,000 Hamas fighters, but the ones living in Doha remain in clover cooking up retribution across the globe.
Trump is not my clown, I despise him and always have.
My preferred solution is that Hamas surrender unconditionally. My least worst solution if they insist that the fighting continues is that Hamas are destroyed.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
Non-clinical depression doesn't count anyway by definition so you've lost a goiod chunk of your assumption right there.
People are getting signed off for it though and receiving sickness benefits.
If it's that bad then it's clinical by definition, and certainly by pretty rough practice given the nature of DWP, certainly after the first few months. Unless you are a psychiatrist as well as a financier and know better?
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
And also - you don't get PIP because you have condition X. Far from it. You get PIP if you get sufficient points for the things you cannot do in daily life because of X.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
And plenty of people do have PIPs who can do all those things, but are signed off saying they can't.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
PIP doesn't sign you off.
I never said signed off as not working, I said they are signed off as unable to do things in life they can, which is a different matter.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
TBF what you said was also "Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP."
Yes, I know people who are doing that.
Optimal solution if you want to game the system, as I've often said, is work 16 hours on the books, get benefits, and work cash in hand beyond that. If you can get PIP on top, even better.
If you know anyone doing that you should report them.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Climate-change deniers' revenge.
It appears to be policies aimed at people who think energy is far too cheap and reliable.
If this is a real proposal it makes me assume Reform are going Nimby harder than anyone has ever Nimbyed before, which could be a popular play. If today's system were were in place we'd probably never have built transmission towers, railways, or motorways, politicians would be too scared.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
ReformUk Windfall tax on renewable generated power A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
Reform are wrong about everything. If you went through every issue line by line and came up with the most ill-informed answer on every one you would have the Reform manifesto.
I read all the manifestos I could find, and I can tell you that the SDP one was the wackiest. It had an unusual level of detail on local government and academia minutiae, making me think it was written by a student or a cllr who worked at a university. They were going to make all pupils and staff jog a mile every day.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.
Comments
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
·
37m
Trump’s Defence Secretary: “Just to be clear, you lot aren’t our priority any more”
Trump’s British supporters: “Isn’t Trump great!!!”,
The notion of any of this changing under any likely future administration - save in the event of a strike by Britain's creditors - is nil.
✅ Scrap net zero & recover environmental subsidies via a windfall tax.
✅ Ban the dangerous battery energy storage systems.
✅ Force new pylon cables to go underground.
https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1889731568425390182
Fundamentally, the problem is too many oldies.
I think we need to be radical: ultimately assisted dying should be available to all after the age of (say) 70. And we should include financial incentives to people to take advantage of a way to leave this earth in a clean and pain free way: no wasting away in pain with cancer, no worrying about the heating bills, etc.
We could easily save £30bn from the welfare, pensions and NHS bill if people could simply hang around a little less. My back of the envelope calculation is that for every six months we reduce life expectancy -assuming it is concentrated among the oldest- the government would save around £12bn.
Of course, none of this would be compulsory (we all like our older posters on here). But there are many people who -given the right incentives- might choose to pull the plug a little earlier than otherwise.
We may have to live with an authoritarian semi fascist USA - we shall see - but there is no evidence that even quite rightish voters in the UK have any fondness for the real article.
The other issue with cutting benefits is that it immediately causes a recession because every penny of UC is pumped straight back into the economy. State pensions: not so much.
However, the answer is:
- Apply NI to all earnings, including pensions and investment income
- 0.5% Wealth Tax
A front-of-shirt sponsor of Everton football club is giving up its licence
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5y9ggqpqdo
On the other hand, the slapper who does the pron videos, she has an amazing PR/marketing team. Even the BBC can't help but mention her on a regular basis.
My preferred option is an unconditional Hamas surrender and peace can occur, but if that won't happen then war is hell and war leads to sup-optimal results sometimes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/czj3z10kzjzo
However items two and three are fundamentally dumb.
Battery storage systems are no more dangerous than any other system of concentrated energy storage. Ultimately, if you store a lot of energy in one place, then there are risks associated with that: and that's true whether your energy is battery or hydrocarbons or uranium (or even water). If you want to impose additional safety restrictions, go for it. But banning battery storage (which can only reduce energy bills) on the basis they are "dangerous" is (sorry to repeat myself) dumb beyond belief.
I'm not even going to comment on the last one: it's simply an attempt to price wind out the market because... because... Just dumb.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/12/labour-postpones-long-awaited-industrial-strategy
They didn't do any homework prior to government did they. That Ming Vase they were worried about breaking was empty.
Why don't we adopt Carnegie's philosophy: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced” and just let the state take all the wealth an individual hasn't disposed of in her or her life.
Inheritance is a cancer on society - it feeds the 'something for nothing' society.
Any lover of US democracy should stay their hand for a good time yet.
I cannot, of course, speak for lovers of Ukrainian democracy.
Hamas can be defeated militarily, if necessary. But what is threatening the current ceasefire is Trump and Netanyahu's talk of ethnic cleansing. What about we make it clear that ethnic cleansing is not an option? That shouldn't be a difficult statement for any country to make. No-one should be promoting it. How is this a difficult idea?
Last minute equaliser by Everton
Can't catch a break?
It's like watching Everton again!
David Moyes is a football genius.
Unbelievable too that after over 130 years of history it's ended at 41 apiece, all square on the fay, all square in the history books.
Anyways. 3 sent off after full time. Doucore, Jones and Slot.
Helpful hint: what you read in the DT doesn't count.
If Hamas want to lay down their arms and surrender then I'd be delighted, but if they don't then Israel should take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to destroy them.
Anyone who wants to seek refuge away from the conflict should be able to do so in a neighbouring state, that's what refugee status exists for.
Maybe it was easier in the past, but not now.
"My GP says I have depression give me £5K a year" is a media myth.
Many of them work cash in hand as well as collecting their PIP.
Saying that based on real life, no papers, and a great many people will know at least one person who is signed off on PIP that should not be, but is.
You can work full time and receive it. Many do.
The problem is that some people do need it, while others are playing the system for fools and denying it is to deny reality.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6426d91cfbe620000c17da64/easy-read-get-help-from-personal-independence-payment.pdf
Neil Henderson
@hendopolis
·
4m
I: Cabinet ministers at risk as Starmer plans reshuffle #TomorrowsPapersToday
The Nigerian woman, who was granted anonymity, submitted eight different appeals against a rejection of her right to remain in the UK. They ranged from claims under ECHR Article Eight, which guarantees a right to a family life, to assertions she was a victim of trafficking.
They were all rejected over a 10-year period.
In her ninth appeal, she claimed she faced persecution if she returned to Nigeria due to her membership of IPOB and her attendance at its protests, rallies and campaigns. She said protesters at the Nigerian high commission were photographed and potentially watched on CCTV.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/12/asylum-seeker-joined-terror-group-so-she-could-stay-in-uk/
The headline is slightly misleading, but 9 appeals....
The problem though lies in how it would disproportionately hit certain sectors. If you want lots of universities to go bust, or councils to get in even bigger debt funding social care in the short term, then that's what you're going for. Which is fine, perhaps we should ditch our current model as dysfunctional - but you then have to take the hit and politicians know that'll make you very unpopular.
And the point is that let's say, for the sake of argument, you are right - the previous Tory government were *not* working to your assumption as their own spending plans assumed high migration numbers even as they made immigration a campaigning issue!
But under Trump it's utterly unreliable as an ally, and in some respects actively hostile to our interests.
But nuance is necessary; the US is not just Trump. We cannot, and should not throw away a century of friendship.
At least for now, anyway.
Optimal solution if you want to game the system, as I've often said, is work 16 hours on the books, get benefits, and work cash in hand beyond that. If you can get PIP on top, even better.
No successful business chops and changes senior management every year. Tim Apple, Nvidia, etc.
On the other hand if Hamas lays down it's arms, the fighting is over.
If Hamas want to fight, I bloody well hope it is in vain and they are annihilated. You should 100% be calling for Hamas to surrender and stop fighting unconditionally.
"Bathgate no more
Linwood no more
Methil no more
Irvine no more"
We're f*****! Your Mrs Thatcher sold our industrial base to America, Germany and China and they closed us down and moved all our means of engineering production to Mexico, Eastern Europe and the Far East. We haven't got the skillset, the equipment, the cash or the knowhow to build weapons grade anything anymore.
So far we've seen Trump talking about seizing the Panama canal, taking over Greenland, incorporating Canada as the 51st state, designating cartels as terrorist groups to allow military intervention in Mexico, buying Gaza and expelling the Palestinians with no right to return, and many other extreme ideas within the US itself. In none of these cases does Trump seem to have discussed these ideas with the countries they apply to first, and the wishes of the governments and citizens do not appear to concern him at all. This is all completely unprecedented, and actions more like those of a rogue state with a crazed dictator leading it.
So the US may not be the enemy of the UK today, but it wouldn't take much action along the lines that Trump has mooted to make the US a de facto adversary.
That's about it.
Apart from stopping the death and suffering, another benefit to ending the fighting in Ukraine is that it is increasingly unaffordable.
Despite international help, the Ukrainian government has increased a range of taxes to help fund the fight against Russia. Last month brought an increase in the military levy that individuals pay on their wages; other tax increases have been imposed on alcohol, tobacco and banks.
Despite the government estimating that the economy grew about 3.6% last year, it's still smaller than it was before the war started in 2022. And this year’s budget allocates more money than ever for defence & security, almost $54bn – which is about 26% of the entire economy. By comparison, Russia is forecast to spend about 6.7% of its GDP on defence.
Russia’s attacks on energy infrastructure have led to rolling blackouts and made it hard for businesses to be productive and pay taxes. With inflation running at an annualised 12.9%, the economy is another major battle front for President Zelensky’s government to fight on.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4g97971rwnt
That's it!
Except the Israelis are still being threatened with it too.
And there's plenty of other Muslim states the Palestinians could seek refuge in, there's zero other Jewish ones.
Either Hamas surrender unconditionally, or they need to be destroyed. It was true after the atrocity in October and it's still true today.
I have a feeling he is going to be the first one to walk.
https://www.gov.uk/report-benefit-fraud
Fail to do so and you are complicit.
Genuinely impressive to scramble around and discover four policies that somehow both oppose net zero *and* increase the cost of energy.
Normally these two things are diametrically opposed. But this policy announcement somehow unites them in all the wrong ways.
https://nitter.poast.org/tomhfh/status/1889800077771940032#m
ReformUk
Windfall tax on renewable generated power
A solar farm tax on farms taking the renewable subsidy
Ban on Battery Energy Storage Systens
Legislate to force national grid to put cables underground
What your clown Trump has done is green lighted Bibi to kill.or displace 2 million Palestinians through a process of ethnic cleansing. True, you might eradicate 30,000 Hamas fighters, but the ones living in Doha remain in clover cooking up retribution across the globe.
Trump, being very transactional on an immediate basis, presumably will go out of his way to say no-one can rely on the USA, no matter past connections or alliances.
My preferred solution is that Hamas surrender unconditionally. My least worst solution if they insist that the fighting continues is that Hamas are destroyed.
Better Hamas fighters living in Doha than Gaza.
I think I rated the Reform one as a B, being well presented (and mercifully short) if insubstantial.