Musk is like Osborne closing down SureStart in every town during austerity but 100x bigger.
Madness.
An entire US generation will pay the price.
In the speech where he did the salute (and mimed planting flags on Mars) Musk said he was so pleasantly surprised at the "optimism" of his audience, "you guys".
He reminded me of Lady Gaga who (possibly at Glastonbury) expressed surprise from the stage at how so many fans had been motivated to turn up to listen to her music in the pouring rain and all the mud. Then, she said, she realised how willing the punters were to "suffer for their love of music".
Two moments when the performer on the stage practically gave voice to their thoughts that OMFG what is wrong with you lot for looking up to me - if I gave you a shit sandwich and told you it was a bowl of custard you'd probably believe me.
Sadly I think you are wrong, people here are mostly top 10% the world as it is works for them. There is growing anger and I am not top 10% I mix with these people daily. I think reform will be tried first then when it doesn't work as it wont then it will become civil conflict...the bottom 50% really don't have anything to lose
Agreed. Most PB posters are doing fine out of the current system. They are not affected by the growing void where much of society used to live their lives. The void where before you had people who did not have an extensive education or special talents, but could work hard and enjoy a comfortable existence. They could own their home and a car, go on holiday abroad, have kids, and still have some money left over for the occasional night out or nice dinner.
For many that's gone now. They still work hard but can't even pay the bills any more. Buying a house is impossible, having kids would be a financial disaster, they're shopping at Aldi to make the budget last until the end of the month. They're driving a budget car they won't be afford to replace when it wears out because the government will have banned petrol and diesel cars. The electricity bill brings dread.
They live next to that nice old lady who's slowly killing herself caring for a disabled husband and had her life ruined when the DWP sanctioned her for working a couple of hours a week in a shop to get money to keep the heating on.
But they see their boss living in a six bedroom house, buying a £100,000 SUV, wearing a Rolex, going on holiday to five times a year and enjoying private healthcare. They see public sector 'climate advisors' and 'diversity champions' on near six figure salaries. They see CEOs earning as much in a day as they do in six months, CEOs who fail at their jobs and get paid millions to move on to another lucrative position.
And I haven't even mentioned immigration or the dire state of public services.
This is not a sustainable society, it's a recipe for revolution. The UK is maybe a decade from serious civil strife and a strongman who claims to have the answers, but other countries will get there in the near future. The US is just a canary in the coal mine.
People get the governments they vote for and deserve, whether Tory and earlier Tory and LD, now Labour and maybe Reform next time, in whole or in part. Same as Americans voted freely for Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.
However as long as all adults are freely entitled to vote they are not entitled to engage in civil strife and the police and rule if law must be imposed on those that do engage in that.
As for your statement, most of the population own a house still, 100 years ago most rented and most still manage to have a child even if the birthrate has fallen. UK voters also rejected twice Corbyn's hammer with tax the rich mantra you seem to desire
Stop talking bollocks, last election almost 50% of people didn't vote...I didn't vote because every single person I could of voted for was a worthless piece of shit as was the party they belonged to. If you walk into a restaurant and can only order a shit sandwich or a shit pizza is not a reason to tell people its their own fault they are hungry as they could have ordered
You have the right to vote. What you don't have is the right to have your chosen candidate win. If there was no one who you agreed with then you can stand yourself. There were more Independent MPs elected at this last GE than at an GE since 1950.
If 50% didn't vote then they have no right to moan about the outcome. Or rather they have the right to moan but we have the perfect excuse to ignore them. But of course voting means taking some responsibility and we all know that too many people would rather do nothing and moan than do something and have to take responsibility for their actions.
Sorry richard we often agree but I can't this time....the fact is most don't want to stand themselves....they just want a candidate that actually is in it for the people rather than themselves. A question...at what percentage of the eligible voting for a national parliament does that national parliament become questionable. Local government elections have dropped to about 25% participation because most people realise there is no point voting...increasingly people are seeing general elections in the same light
Even in the last general election more voted than in the 2001 general election and still nearly 60% turned out.
I have never known a council election turnout over 40% in my lifetime, as unless you are particularly interested in council tax, bin collection, social care, highways and potholes or planning most aren't bothered
I once campaigned in a council by-election with a 65% turnout.
The entire Federal government is being shut down in broad daylight.
Will Congress do anything?
It seems not.
'Shining city on a hill' my arse as Jim Royale would say.
Not dissimilar to what Milei is doing in Argentina but both he and Trump (Musk) have a mandate for it as they were elected on it even if you disagree
Trump did not run on cutting Medicare or Social Security. Or increasing the debt limit by $4.5 trillion to finance tax cuts for the rich.
He ran on slashing the size of the Federal government, deporting immigrants, ending EDI policies in the government, imposing tariffs on imports, imposing a peace deal in Gaza and Ukraine and drilling more for oil and gas all of which he is doing
The entire Federal government is being shut down in broad daylight.
Will Congress do anything?
It seems not.
'Shining city on a hill' my arse as Jim Royale would say.
Not dissimilar to what Milei is doing in Argentina but both he and Trump (Musk) have a mandate for it as they were elected on it even if you disagree
Trump did not run on cutting Medicare or Social Security. Or increasing the debt limit by $4.5 trillion to finance tax cuts for the rich.
He ran on slashing the size of the Federal government, deporting immigrants, ending EDI policies in the government, imposing tariffs on imports, imposing a peace deal in Gaza and Ukraine and drilling more for oil and gas all of which he is doing
I might be imagining it, but I think the rate at which Trump has been telling obvious lies this time round is a lot lower than in 2017. This may be something that has required unusually large effort on his part - perhaps so large that he'll break under the strain.
The entire Federal government is being shut down in broad daylight.
Will Congress do anything?
It seems not.
'Shining city on a hill' my arse as Jim Royale would say.
Not dissimilar to what Milei is doing in Argentina but both he and Trump (Musk) have a mandate for it as they were elected on it even if you disagree
Trump did not run on cutting Medicare or Social Security. Or increasing the debt limit by $4.5 trillion to finance tax cuts for the rich.
He ran on slashing the size of the Federal government, deporting immigrants, ending EDI policies in the government, imposing tariffs on imports, imposing a peace deal in Gaza and Ukraine and drilling more for oil and gas all of which he is doing
Yes and IF it is seen to be effective, it will become the policy for all Governments of whatever stripe much as privatisation in the 80s and 90s. However, and it’s far too early to tell, IF the impact on Americans as a whole (not just the very rich) is negative, Trump and his brand of Republican politics may get a big kicking in the 2026 midterms.
The entire Federal government is being shut down in broad daylight.
Will Congress do anything?
It seems not.
'Shining city on a hill' my arse as Jim Royale would say.
Not dissimilar to what Milei is doing in Argentina but both he and Trump (Musk) have a mandate for it as they were elected on it even if you disagree
Trump did not run on cutting Medicare or Social Security. Or increasing the debt limit by $4.5 trillion to finance tax cuts for the rich.
He ran on slashing the size of the Federal government, deporting immigrants, ending EDI policies in the government, imposing tariffs on imports, imposing a peace deal in Gaza and Ukraine and drilling more for oil and gas all of which he is doing
The bigger problem is that he does not have a mandate for how it's being done. The US isn't an elective monarchy. You can't legally - or shouldn't be able to - shut down Federal Agencies without congressional approval. You are not allowed to simply withdraw funding Congress has earmarked for specific spending without approval either.
There are obvious reasons for this - as a President could simply, as Trump is doing, effectively override any decision made by Congress without changing the law. Or you can simply cut off those you perceive as political opponents. NOAA puts out a hurricane forecast you don't like, bye, CDC says bird flu is getting bad and you want to ignore them. Tata. That's a mental way to run a country.
It would also avoid the chaos Trump is creating whereby everyone from scientists and doctors to farmers has seen money they'd budgeted for disappear, not knowing if it will come back at all - or in some cases pretty much knowing it won't as their work has been wrecked beyond repair overnight.
So while he does have a mandate for say, tariffs or withdrawing political support from Ukraine, as they are within his executive powers, he doesn't for Musk's actions. If he went to Congress and said "I want to shut down these programmes and agencies" and they voted that through then he would. He hasn't, so they haven't.
It's rather like if Keir Starmer, having said some taxes would have to rise, unilaterally, without going to parliament or passing a law to that effect said HMRC would now be collecting a 20% supertax on any registered Tory donor. He wouldn't have a mandate for it, and it wouldn't be something that would or should be legal. Sadly America has pretty much lost the rule of law so Musk and Trump will likely get away with it until voters feel the consequences.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
For defence, with this strategic context, the answer is easy: borrowing initially, then work it out. The markets will bear it, because without it there can be no markets. And even doubling the defence budget is relatively modest out of £1Tn in spending per year.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
The odd thing about the word 'oriental' being offensive is that you still commonly see it used in restaurant names just like here.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
The odd thing about the word 'oriental' being offensive is that you still commonly see it used in restaurant names just like here.
Quite, that is why I was rather confused when this happen to me. And the level of warning I was given was like I have just dropped the N word or here the P word, and this wasn't in a Portland or SF and before everybody was getting very touchy about pronouns.
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
For defence, with this strategic context, the answer is easy: borrowing initially, then work it out. The markets will bear it, because without it there can be no markets. And even doubling the defence budget is relatively modest out of £1Tn in spending per year.
“work it out” is doing all the heavy lifting.
I suppose we can always remind future generations, much as we did with Covid, it was an emergency and vital to keep us alive and safe, as for the crippling future debt interest repayments…..
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
For defence, with this strategic context, the answer is easy: borrowing initially, then work it out. The markets will bear it, because without it there can be no markets. And even doubling the defence budget is relatively modest out of £1Tn in spending per year.
“work it out” is doing all the heavy lifting.
I suppose we can always remind future generations, much as we did with Covid, it was an emergency and vital to keep us alive and safe, as for the crippling future debt interest repayments…..
What an insulting implication about me. I thought you were better than that.
It’s what you do to finance wars or preparation for them. You can’t expect to rewire the public finances fast enough, but you do take a hit on the back end.
We can’t increase taxes really, so basically it’s a base of dropping the triple lock and benefits, and some charging for NHS services.
"Review Empty Wigs by Jonathan Meades – a black museum of savage stories Encompassing eugenics, euthanasia and terrorism, this dark, sprawling novel by a man of many talents is not for the easily offended"
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
Ajax is actually a good example of the false economy of cutting defence. The right answer was Tracer, which we cancelled, before casting around for something off the shelf, finding nothing, and doing too little development into Ajax as a new variant of existing European vehicle. Tracer would have been in service quicker and been better even though it went as a “cut”.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Hang over from colonial times and more recently the internment of Japanese during WWII is a big scar. US was also very racist towards Asian people in the 20th Century and despite historically much larger populations from all across (South) East Asia they don't really like it all being lumped under being somebody of the "Orient".
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Hang over from colonial times and more recently the internment of Japanese during WWII is a big scar. Also historically much larger populations from all across (South) East Asia and they don't really like it all being lumped under being somebody of the "Orient".
I had no idea. In my mind it’s just descriptive. It’s like people that say “celestial” is offensive rather than just old fashioned, when the Chinese themselves use it and it’s complimentary.
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
For defence, with this strategic context, the answer is easy: borrowing initially, then work it out. The markets will bear it, because without it there can be no markets. And even doubling the defence budget is relatively modest out of £1Tn in spending per year.
“work it out” is doing all the heavy lifting.
I suppose we can always remind future generations, much as we did with Covid, it was an emergency and vital to keep us alive and safe, as for the crippling future debt interest repayments…..
What an insulting implication about me. I thought you were better than that.
It’s what you do to finance wars or preparation for them. You can’t expect to rewire the public finances fast enough, but you do take a hit on the back end.
We can’t increase taxes really, so basically it’s a base of dropping the triple lock and benefits, and some charging for NHS services.
I apologise if you feel slighted, it wasn’t my intention.
I’m forced to agree we can’t change the world as quick as the world seems to change. To be fair, in times of “war” or national crisis, Governments have taken some pretty drastic action to try to help fund the crisis.
Someone will tell me I’m wrong but income tax came in to fund the Napoleonic Wars and if 5% of GDP on defence is to become the “new normal” we need to think or rethink how we can fill the gap and I don’t support borrowing ad infinitum.
To be blunt, I think taxes should rise and arguing it’s necessary for our defence might be compelling. I don’t think we can fund all £60 billion by tax rises but we can go some way now to ensure future generations aren’t crippled by debt interest repayments.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Hang over from colonial times and more recently the internment of Japanese during WWII is a big scar. Also historically much larger populations from all across (South) East Asia and they don't really like it all being lumped under being somebody of the "Orient".
I had no idea. In my mind it’s just descriptive. It’s like people that say “celestial” is offensive rather than just old fashioned, when the Chinese themselves use it and it’s complimentary.
I think it is because back in the day they were branded as Oriental in the same way as all blacks were branded a Negros, treated pretty horrifically, and the US for obvious reasons is extremely touchy about any racial. But calling people who have a learning difficulty as having mental retardation, knock yourself (at least until pretty recently). Although, I think calling somebody a retard now in the US is bad enough for bleepage on tv shows in the same way as spastic became verboten long between the Spastics Society rebranded.
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
For defence, with this strategic context, the answer is easy: borrowing initially, then work it out. The markets will bear it, because without it there can be no markets. And even doubling the defence budget is relatively modest out of £1Tn in spending per year.
“work it out” is doing all the heavy lifting.
I suppose we can always remind future generations, much as we did with Covid, it was an emergency and vital to keep us alive and safe, as for the crippling future debt interest repayments…..
What an insulting implication about me. I thought you were better than that.
It’s what you do to finance wars or preparation for them. You can’t expect to rewire the public finances fast enough, but you do take a hit on the back end.
We can’t increase taxes really, so basically it’s a base of dropping the triple lock and benefits, and some charging for NHS services.
I apologise if you feel slighted, it wasn’t my intention.
I’m forced to agree we can’t change the world as quick as the world seems to change. To be fair, in times of “war” or national crisis, Governments have taken some pretty drastic action to try to help fund the crisis.
Someone will tell me I’m wrong but income tax came in to fund the Napoleonic Wars and if 5% of GDP on defence is to become the “new normal” we need to think or rethink how we can fill the gap and I don’t support borrowing ad infinitum.
To be blunt, I think taxes should rise and arguing it’s necessary for our defence might be compelling. I don’t think we can fund all £60 billion by tax rises but we can go some way now to ensure future generations aren’t crippled by debt interest repayments.
Sorry, no, it was me being rather too typical of the internet and choosing to be offended.
Whether we are taking about finding cash for defence or education/potholes/AI the same constraints are there. Health spending cannot grow forever, and nor can pensions or welfare. Taxation can do a bit, but we need to do some thinking about our social contract.
For example, I am starting to think that because my work pension means I should not need a state pension, maybe I ought not to get one? As a quid pro quo maybe I can have boosted unemployment cash if it all goes a bit wrong for me, to get me to the next job?
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Hang over from colonial times and more recently the internment of Japanese during WWII is a big scar. Also historically much larger populations from all across (South) East Asia and they don't really like it all being lumped under being somebody of the "Orient".
I had no idea. In my mind it’s just descriptive. It’s like people that say “celestial” is offensive rather than just old fashioned, when the Chinese themselves use it and it’s complimentary.
I always thought Celestial referred to the stars, the universe, rather than the Chinese.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Hang over from colonial times and more recently the internment of Japanese during WWII is a big scar. Also historically much larger populations from all across (South) East Asia and they don't really like it all being lumped under being somebody of the "Orient".
I had no idea. In my mind it’s just descriptive. It’s like people that say “celestial” is offensive rather than just old fashioned, when the Chinese themselves use it and it’s complimentary.
I always thought Celestial referred to the stars, the universe, rather than the Chinese.
It’s both. It’s very old fashioned now but they were the “celestial empire” to imply there was something “other” and magical about them and they could be from the stars. Some Chinese use it, particularly online, these days as a hint of superiority.
Going to be interesting to see how they make all the sums (appear) to add up.
To be fair, everyone who wants an extra £60 billion on defense should explain from where the money is coming. The “slash and burn the public sector” types are long on rhetoric but woefully short on specifics.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
For defence, with this strategic context, the answer is easy: borrowing initially, then work it out. The markets will bear it, because without it there can be no markets. And even doubling the defence budget is relatively modest out of £1Tn in spending per year.
“work it out” is doing all the heavy lifting.
I suppose we can always remind future generations, much as we did with Covid, it was an emergency and vital to keep us alive and safe, as for the crippling future debt interest repayments…..
What an insulting implication about me. I thought you were better than that.
It’s what you do to finance wars or preparation for them. You can’t expect to rewire the public finances fast enough, but you do take a hit on the back end.
We can’t increase taxes really, so basically it’s a base of dropping the triple lock and benefits, and some charging for NHS services.
I apologise if you feel slighted, it wasn’t my intention.
I’m forced to agree we can’t change the world as quick as the world seems to change. To be fair, in times of “war” or national crisis, Governments have taken some pretty drastic action to try to help fund the crisis.
Someone will tell me I’m wrong but income tax came in to fund the Napoleonic Wars and if 5% of GDP on defence is to become the “new normal” we need to think or rethink how we can fill the gap and I don’t support borrowing ad infinitum.
To be blunt, I think taxes should rise and arguing it’s necessary for our defence might be compelling. I don’t think we can fund all £60 billion by tax rises but we can go some way now to ensure future generations aren’t crippled by debt interest repayments.
Money can always be found for weapons. Imagine 60 billion for a national house building effort or extensive renewables build out, absurd. But attach it to fancy things that fly or float and its only rational to piss away our productive capacity towards stupid GDP thresholds. God only knows how much national wealth the MOD has incinerated,
It seems more rational to work out what we actually need and then allocate the cash.
"Labour’s progressive centre has collapsed The party is appealing to a socially conservative base at the cost of its more liberal-minded voters. By Ben Walker"
Yes, of course, quietly requesting that my own country retains some semblance of the ethnic and cultural identity it has had for 1500 years makes me a “Nazi” equivalent to “Hitler”
You know what? This madness is gonna end badly for you guys. Don’t say you weren’t warned
The idea that "if you don't lie over for us within a few years, we're gonna have to win by methods you're REALLY not going to find to your liking" seems to be awfully in vogue at the moment on the North London loony right.
In the words of the ex-spad husband of a commissioning editor at the Spectator (on his Substack site):
"Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.
Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first."
(This descends into embarrassing gibberish in places. But the basic idea is "We achieved Brexit and we ain't finished, not by a long chalk, and maybe this won't be easy and fast, but we know about History, and if this isn't easy then it's gonna be bigly and seriously violent with a capital V." If this isn't deliberate destabilisation of a country, I don't know what is.)
What the fuck is continuous mass immigration on the scale of 300,000-1m people a year but “deliberate destabilisation”?
No one voted for this. Time and again we have voted AGAINST this. Yet on and on it goes
So democracy has ceased to function. What happens then?
There is quite a lot you and I would likely disagree about - I'm basically a bit of a wet social democrat - but I think we're more or less on the same page about the scale of immigration. I.e. it's mad. An open door policy on immigration - about 1.2 million in the year ending mid-2023, with a net value of nearly 800,000 even accounting for those going in the opposite direction - cannot be anything other than destabilising. Apart from all the other negatives, out of control population growth entirely defeats the object of Angela Rayner's housing drive.
You would hope that this Government gets that and will put an end to it. I don't expect it though, sadly.
I actually think some in the Labour Party DO get this, but it’s far too late, and too many still don’t get it - or simply won’t
Absent a tech revolution saving us, here’s how this will play out. European electorates - UK definitely included - will vote for increasingly hard then far right parties. These parties won’t just limit or prohibit immigration, they will go much further. They will begin mass deportations of - firstly - illegal migrants and then legal migrants. Millions of people will be forcibly expelled and borders will be guarded with live ammunition
No doubt I will be accused of wishcasting. This is not that. I have two daughters growing up in the UK and Oz and I dearly want them to grow up in peaceful, racially harmonious societies
I simply don’t believe that’s doable. A brutally violent outcome is now unavoidable (absent the saviour machines). It’s so bleak I generally try not to think about it
Professor David Betz of King's College London believes that we are heading towards ideal conditions for civil conflict:
Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.
I think we're further away from civil conflict now than we were in the period 2016-19, when the refusal or inability of a large part of the political class to implement the results of the largest vote in the nation's history, which they themselves had called and promised to implement, meant that the legitimacy of our democracy was under serious threat.
And we're considerably further away than we were in the late 1970s, when tens of millions of days were lost to strikes, rubbish was piling high in Leicester Square, the dead were going unburied and Northern Ireland was being, well, Northern Ireland.
But maybe I'm one of nature's optimists.
Sadly I think you are wrong, people here are mostly top 10% the world as it is works for them. There is growing anger and I am not top 10% I mix with these people daily. I think reform will be tried first then when it doesn't work as it wont then it will become civil conflict...the bottom 50% really don't have anything to lose
Here is an example, people here go on about people like nurses having to use a food bank....fair enough then they go on in other posts going lets just add a couple of percent on income tax....yeah well that person on min wage already struggling is going to have 20£ less each month.....2% extra for most here means I will buy a cheaper bottle of wine
The solution to the increasingly stretched and threadbare state is therefore, amongst other things, expressly not to keep jacking up income tax and national insurance, but to end the excessively lenient treatment of assets. That, and to better target benefits and tax breaks on those who really need it.
An older society is a poorer society, but that would be a lot easier to manage if more of the burden was shifted away from work and put onto capital, and if large quantities of tax receipts weren't needlessly squandered. To return to one of my favourite topics, I care about skint old people having enough to eat, but I'm against propping up the spending power of rich old people with taxation and wealth transfers that erode the living standards of poorer, younger ones. The hikes in taxes on work to raise billions to subsidise the booking of cruise holidays by asset millionaire pensioners must be stopped.
Well this awful government has whacked up inheritance tax on farmers, whacked up national insurance on business owners and slashed pensioners winter fuel allowance so some have been frozen this winter let alone going on cruise holidays
Reminder that you pay zero IHT if you retire and gift the farm more than 7 years before death, ie on average life expectancy that means retiring at 73 (you can still keep and live in the farmhouse and bequeath that on death).
And what if you don’t want to retire?
The issue isn’t with farmers paying IHT, the issue is that it is undermining the viability of a category of small businesses. They have high asset value but not much cash flow.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
The odd thing about the word 'oriental' being offensive is that you still commonly see it used in restaurant names just like here.
Terrible though war is, it is the main generator of technical innovation.
Is that true?
I know that war is a major generator of technical innovation, but which of the myriad inventions that came out of Xerox Parc for example were driven by war?
Which war is driving Apple right now?
War is enormously destructive of economic capacity. It drives certain forms of technical innovation, but overall, it’s probably a net negative.
Naively I would think the period after the war (for the winner) is the maximum opportunity for the gains, you have built up capabilities and skills through necessity of the war, you are still going to be investing in science / defence and then no longer having to do the actual fighting / keep having things destroyed.
Should we get a peace deal, would anybody be surprised if Ukraine had a number of successful drone companies / tech based upon using drones.
And you can sometimes plunder the science base of the defeated.
But we’ve not run the counterfactual; how would technology have developed, had WWI and/or WWII not occurred ?
That's true, but as we have seen in the UK, spending on things like defence, science innovation etc, it all starts becoming lower priority the further you get away from a major wars. The US is a bit of an outlier that they have always spent massively on this regardless since WWII, no matter which party has been in power.
The Thatcher government resumed its defence cuts immediately after the Falklands War. Immediately. And its university cuts.
Yes, of course, quietly requesting that my own country retains some semblance of the ethnic and cultural identity it has had for 1500 years makes me a “Nazi” equivalent to “Hitler”
You know what? This madness is gonna end badly for you guys. Don’t say you weren’t warned
The idea that "if you don't lie over for us within a few years, we're gonna have to win by methods you're REALLY not going to find to your liking" seems to be awfully in vogue at the moment on the North London loony right.
In the words of the ex-spad husband of a commissioning editor at the Spectator (on his Substack site):
"Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.
Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first."
(This descends into embarrassing gibberish in places. But the basic idea is "We achieved Brexit and we ain't finished, not by a long chalk, and maybe this won't be easy and fast, but we know about History, and if this isn't easy then it's gonna be bigly and seriously violent with a capital V." If this isn't deliberate destabilisation of a country, I don't know what is.)
What the fuck is continuous mass immigration on the scale of 300,000-1m people a year but “deliberate destabilisation”?
No one voted for this. Time and again we have voted AGAINST this. Yet on and on it goes
So democracy has ceased to function. What happens then?
There is quite a lot you and I would likely disagree about - I'm basically a bit of a wet social democrat - but I think we're more or less on the same page about the scale of immigration. I.e. it's mad. An open door policy on immigration - about 1.2 million in the year ending mid-2023, with a net value of nearly 800,000 even accounting for those going in the opposite direction - cannot be anything other than destabilising. Apart from all the other negatives, out of control population growth entirely defeats the object of Angela Rayner's housing drive.
You would hope that this Government gets that and will put an end to it. I don't expect it though, sadly.
I actually think some in the Labour Party DO get this, but it’s far too late, and too many still don’t get it - or simply won’t
Absent a tech revolution saving us, here’s how this will play out. European electorates - UK definitely included - will vote for increasingly hard then far right parties. These parties won’t just limit or prohibit immigration, they will go much further. They will begin mass deportations of - firstly - illegal migrants and then legal migrants. Millions of people will be forcibly expelled and borders will be guarded with live ammunition
No doubt I will be accused of wishcasting. This is not that. I have two daughters growing up in the UK and Oz and I dearly want them to grow up in peaceful, racially harmonious societies
I simply don’t believe that’s doable. A brutally violent outcome is now unavoidable (absent the saviour machines). It’s so bleak I generally try not to think about it
Professor David Betz of King's College London believes that we are heading towards ideal conditions for civil conflict:
Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.
I think we're further away from civil conflict now than we were in the period 2016-19, when the refusal or inability of a large part of the political class to implement the results of the largest vote in the nation's history, which they themselves had called and promised to implement, meant that the legitimacy of our democracy was under serious threat.
And we're considerably further away than we were in the late 1970s, when tens of millions of days were lost to strikes, rubbish was piling high in Leicester Square, the dead were going unburied and Northern Ireland was being, well, Northern Ireland.
But maybe I'm one of nature's optimists.
Sadly I think you are wrong, people here are mostly top 10% the world as it is works for them. There is growing anger and I am not top 10% I mix with these people daily. I think reform will be tried first then when it doesn't work as it wont then it will become civil conflict...the bottom 50% really don't have anything to lose
Here is an example, people here go on about people like nurses having to use a food bank....fair enough then they go on in other posts going lets just add a couple of percent on income tax....yeah well that person on min wage already struggling is going to have 20£ less each month.....2% extra for most here means I will buy a cheaper bottle of wine
The solution to the increasingly stretched and threadbare state is therefore, amongst other things, expressly not to keep jacking up income tax and national insurance, but to end the excessively lenient treatment of assets. That, and to better target benefits and tax breaks on those who really need it.
An older society is a poorer society, but that would be a lot easier to manage if more of the burden was shifted away from work and put onto capital, and if large quantities of tax receipts weren't needlessly squandered. To return to one of my favourite topics, I care about skint old people having enough to eat, but I'm against propping up the spending power of rich old people with taxation and wealth transfers that erode the living standards of poorer, younger ones. The hikes in taxes on work to raise billions to subsidise the booking of cruise holidays by asset millionaire pensioners must be stopped.
Well this awful government has whacked up inheritance tax on farmers, whacked up national insurance on business owners and slashed pensioners winter fuel allowance so some have been frozen this winter let alone going on cruise holidays
Reminder that you pay zero IHT if you retire and gift the farm more than 7 years before death, ie on average life expectancy that means retiring at 73 (you can still keep and live in the farmhouse and bequeath that on death).
And what if you don’t want to retire?
The issue isn’t with farmers paying IHT, the issue is that it is undermining the viability of a category of small businesses. They have high asset value but not much cash flow.
They have high asset value due to the IHT breaks - most farms that come on the market are bought by asset rich people looking to avoid IHT, pushing the price up. Dyson is far from the only one, but he hasn't bought farms totalling 36,000 acres through his Singapore company because of his love of Britisg farming. Every time he, or a rich banker looking to invest a bonus, buys a farm, the price rises.
"Labour’s progressive centre has collapsed The party is appealing to a socially conservative base at the cost of its more liberal-minded voters. By Ben Walker"
On the tragic plane/helicopter collision the other week:
"The NTSB held another press conference about the DCA collision yesterday. Lots of focus on the altitudes of the helicopter, and while we know the helicopter was at 278feet based on its radar altimeter, investigators don’t know what altitude was displayed to crew.
Did you know that the threshold for altimeter accuracy suggested by the AIM is 75 feet? The routes along the river literally didn’t have enough margin for error."
75 foot difference is okay when at thousands of feet. Not so okay when having to navigate in a corridor only 200 foot hight, with 0 being the ground...
The dear leader sycophancy is already off the chart.
No modern president has been more pivotal for our country than Donald J. Trump.
Today, I introduced legislation to designate Trump's Birthday and Flag Day as a federal holiday, ensuring President Trump's contributions to American greatness are forever enshrined into law. https://x.com/RepTenney/status/1890460502477697436
Was Blanche on the blanc? I’m glad I tapped out before I sank more cocktails. I’m not spending any more time in the PB Toilets.
I posted this morning Chagos news will start emerging, following Don & Modi’s tet a tet, but only £12M? That’s nothing compared to the lolly India and and US will get Starmer to hand over to their MAGA friend now in charge of Mauritius. Instead of a £90M first year, I’m suspecting hundreds of millions in “signing on fee.”
I have completed my Sunday School prep for tomorrow. Proverbs 15:17 "Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a fattened ox and hatred with it.” My lesson will be, your hungry years will be the best years of your lives, as you look back. ✝️
I was kicked out of Sunday School as my teacher refused to believe my parents came from a town called Forres. They insisted I meant that they lived near a Forrest. I insisted otherwise.
I lost.
Could have been worse if they came from Fochabers.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Yes, of course, quietly requesting that my own country retains some semblance of the ethnic and cultural identity it has had for 1500 years makes me a “Nazi” equivalent to “Hitler”
You know what? This madness is gonna end badly for you guys. Don’t say you weren’t warned
The idea that "if you don't lie over for us within a few years, we're gonna have to win by methods you're REALLY not going to find to your liking" seems to be awfully in vogue at the moment on the North London loony right.
In the words of the ex-spad husband of a commissioning editor at the Spectator (on his Substack site):
"Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.
Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first."
(This descends into embarrassing gibberish in places. But the basic idea is "We achieved Brexit and we ain't finished, not by a long chalk, and maybe this won't be easy and fast, but we know about History, and if this isn't easy then it's gonna be bigly and seriously violent with a capital V." If this isn't deliberate destabilisation of a country, I don't know what is.)
What the fuck is continuous mass immigration on the scale of 300,000-1m people a year but “deliberate destabilisation”?
No one voted for this. Time and again we have voted AGAINST this. Yet on and on it goes
So democracy has ceased to function. What happens then?
There is quite a lot you and I would likely disagree about - I'm basically a bit of a wet social democrat - but I think we're more or less on the same page about the scale of immigration. I.e. it's mad. An open door policy on immigration - about 1.2 million in the year ending mid-2023, with a net value of nearly 800,000 even accounting for those going in the opposite direction - cannot be anything other than destabilising. Apart from all the other negatives, out of control population growth entirely defeats the object of Angela Rayner's housing drive.
You would hope that this Government gets that and will put an end to it. I don't expect it though, sadly.
I actually think some in the Labour Party DO get this, but it’s far too late, and too many still don’t get it - or simply won’t
Absent a tech revolution saving us, here’s how this will play out. European electorates - UK definitely included - will vote for increasingly hard then far right parties. These parties won’t just limit or prohibit immigration, they will go much further. They will begin mass deportations of - firstly - illegal migrants and then legal migrants. Millions of people will be forcibly expelled and borders will be guarded with live ammunition
No doubt I will be accused of wishcasting. This is not that. I have two daughters growing up in the UK and Oz and I dearly want them to grow up in peaceful, racially harmonious societies
I simply don’t believe that’s doable. A brutally violent outcome is now unavoidable (absent the saviour machines). It’s so bleak I generally try not to think about it
Professor David Betz of King's College London believes that we are heading towards ideal conditions for civil conflict:
Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.
I think we're further away from civil conflict now than we were in the period 2016-19, when the refusal or inability of a large part of the political class to implement the results of the largest vote in the nation's history, which they themselves had called and promised to implement, meant that the legitimacy of our democracy was under serious threat.
And we're considerably further away than we were in the late 1970s, when tens of millions of days were lost to strikes, rubbish was piling high in Leicester Square, the dead were going unburied and Northern Ireland was being, well, Northern Ireland.
But maybe I'm one of nature's optimists.
Sadly I think you are wrong, people here are mostly top 10% the world as it is works for them. There is growing anger and I am not top 10% I mix with these people daily. I think reform will be tried first then when it doesn't work as it wont then it will become civil conflict...the bottom 50% really don't have anything to lose
Here is an example, people here go on about people like nurses having to use a food bank....fair enough then they go on in other posts going lets just add a couple of percent on income tax....yeah well that person on min wage already struggling is going to have 20£ less each month.....2% extra for most here means I will buy a cheaper bottle of wine
The solution to the increasingly stretched and threadbare state is therefore, amongst other things, expressly not to keep jacking up income tax and national insurance, but to end the excessively lenient treatment of assets. That, and to better target benefits and tax breaks on those who really need it.
An older society is a poorer society, but that would be a lot easier to manage if more of the burden was shifted away from work and put onto capital, and if large quantities of tax receipts weren't needlessly squandered. To return to one of my favourite topics, I care about skint old people having enough to eat, but I'm against propping up the spending power of rich old people with taxation and wealth transfers that erode the living standards of poorer, younger ones. The hikes in taxes on work to raise billions to subsidise the booking of cruise holidays by asset millionaire pensioners must be stopped.
Well this awful government has whacked up inheritance tax on farmers, whacked up national insurance on business owners and slashed pensioners winter fuel allowance so some have been frozen this winter let alone going on cruise holidays
The idea pensioners are "freezing to death" because wealthier ones lost a benefit that has been less than their pension goes up each year is laughable and revealing that the attitude is that everyone else should go without so the special interest groups you favour can be kept in the comfort to which they've been accustomed while everyone else has got poorer so they could be protected. Selfishness off the scale.
Pensioners on just state pension and £13k a year ie less than minimum wage, have lost their winter fuel allowance this year and genuinely are at risk of serious illness like pneumonia. Reeves didn't just target millionaire OAPs on cruises.
It isn't selfishness, far from it, Reeves cutting WFA for such low income pensioners was immoral
Don't know where you are getting this nonsense from. There are many, many sources of help for those on low incomes.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
What’s wrong with “oriental”? How is it offensive?
Hang over from colonial times and more recently the internment of Japanese during WWII is a big scar. Also historically much larger populations from all across (South) East Asia and they don't really like it all being lumped under being somebody of the "Orient".
I had no idea. In my mind it’s just descriptive. It’s like people that say “celestial” is offensive rather than just old fashioned, when the Chinese themselves use it and it’s complimentary.
Such "old fashioned" usages tend to be offensive, simply because when they were coined, people were extremely offensive towards the people they referred to.
They carry a baggage which would be there if they were newly coined. That's just how language works.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
DOGE wants to cut Federal staff to pay £4.5tr in tax cuts for the rich in the US. In the UK, the Telegraph says all millionaires have left so no need for tax cuts then.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Perhaps scrapping the two large aircraft carriers that provide zero defence to the European theatre would be a better use of resources.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
It may be what Tice, Farage and Lowe want but they are unreconstructed Thatcherites. Many of those who vote Reform , on the other hand, quite like the State, they like the local library and the Day Centre and the local school for the children and grandchildren. What they don’t want is public money spent on migrants.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
DOGE wants to cut Federal staff to pay £4.5tr in tax cuts for the rich in the US. In the UK, the Telegraph says all millionaires have left so no need for tax cuts then.
Cutting federal staff isn't going to fund the tax cut. Not even close.
That's what the increase in the debt limit is about.
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
The odd thing about the word 'oriental' being offensive is that you still commonly see it used in restaurant names just like here.
My local multi-ethnic supermarket is called Asia Oriental. And it is fairly new - opened after Covid I think. But I suppose it is a mish mash of food from all over the Orient, plus the subcontinent (is India in the Orient?) and some Caribbean.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
If there’s going to be an increase in defence spending, it needs to be spent on what’s actually going to be useful in a European land war.
Wartime spending looks very different to peacetime spending.
You need to prioritise quantity over quality, so loads of ammunition and production of current-tech systems, rather than spending $100bn on the study to investigate the replacement for the F35 which might be in service by 2050.
The exception for things which are new and cheap, such as small drones, where you keep a small DARPA-type group working on advancing the technology, and a facility ready to ramp production of whatever is the current tech at the time it’s needed. Once there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, buy their drone tech.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Perhaps scrapping the two large aircraft carriers that provide zero defence to the European theatre would be a better use of resources.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Perhaps scrapping the two large aircraft carriers that provide zero defence to the European theatre would be a better use of resources.
Except for some extra depth in defence around our island?
An example of how silly political correctness is: in the UK the word "handicapped" is regarded as unacceptable these days and has been for quite a long time, but I believe it is still used officially in the United States.
The US until very recently were quite comfortable with using the term mental retardation to describe people with learning difficulties. But describe somebody from the Orient as Oriental (which was the widely acceptede term in the UK for a long time) in polite company and you will be more than likely asked to leave and labelled as a massive racist.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
If there’s going to be an increase in defence spending, it needs to be spent on what’s actually going to be useful in a European land war.
Wartime spending looks very different to peacetime spending.
You need to prioritise quantity over quality, so loads of ammunition and production of current-tech systems, rather than spending $100bn on the study to investigate the replacement for the F35 which might be in service by 2050.
The exception for things which are new and cheap, such as small drones, where you keep a small DARPA-type group working on advancing the technology, and a facility ready to ramp production of whatever is the current tech at the time it’s needed. Once there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, buy their drone tech.
While I agree that ammunition of all kinds is hugely under-resourced at the moment, it's a lot more complicated than that.
For example, one thing you've not mentioned is the likelihood we're going to have to deploy thousands of troops to Ukraine. Enforcing a ceasefire will be a great deal cheaper than actually fighting a war, but it's going to cost.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Perhaps scrapping the two large aircraft carriers that provide zero defence to the European theatre would be a better use of resources.
There's an argument for that, which I tend to agree with, but it would only provide a bit of what we need.
Yes, of course, quietly requesting that my own country retains some semblance of the ethnic and cultural identity it has had for 1500 years makes me a “Nazi” equivalent to “Hitler”
You know what? This madness is gonna end badly for you guys. Don’t say you weren’t warned
The idea that "if you don't lie over for us within a few years, we're gonna have to win by methods you're REALLY not going to find to your liking" seems to be awfully in vogue at the moment on the North London loony right.
In the words of the ex-spad husband of a commissioning editor at the Spectator (on his Substack site):
"Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.
Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first."
(This descends into embarrassing gibberish in places. But the basic idea is "We achieved Brexit and we ain't finished, not by a long chalk, and maybe this won't be easy and fast, but we know about History, and if this isn't easy then it's gonna be bigly and seriously violent with a capital V." If this isn't deliberate destabilisation of a country, I don't know what is.)
What the fuck is continuous mass immigration on the scale of 300,000-1m people a year but “deliberate destabilisation”?
No one voted for this. Time and again we have voted AGAINST this. Yet on and on it goes
So democracy has ceased to function. What happens then?
There is quite a lot you and I would likely disagree about - I'm basically a bit of a wet social democrat - but I think we're more or less on the same page about the scale of immigration. I.e. it's mad. An open door policy on immigration - about 1.2 million in the year ending mid-2023, with a net value of nearly 800,000 even accounting for those going in the opposite direction - cannot be anything other than destabilising. Apart from all the other negatives, out of control population growth entirely defeats the object of Angela Rayner's housing drive.
You would hope that this Government gets that and will put an end to it. I don't expect it though, sadly.
I actually think some in the Labour Party DO get this, but it’s far too late, and too many still don’t get it - or simply won’t
Absent a tech revolution saving us, here’s how this will play out. European electorates - UK definitely included - will vote for increasingly hard then far right parties. These parties won’t just limit or prohibit immigration, they will go much further. They will begin mass deportations of - firstly - illegal migrants and then legal migrants. Millions of people will be forcibly expelled and borders will be guarded with live ammunition
No doubt I will be accused of wishcasting. This is not that. I have two daughters growing up in the UK and Oz and I dearly want them to grow up in peaceful, racially harmonious societies
I simply don’t believe that’s doable. A brutally violent outcome is now unavoidable (absent the saviour machines). It’s so bleak I generally try not to think about it
Professor David Betz of King's College London believes that we are heading towards ideal conditions for civil conflict:
Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.
I think we're further away from civil conflict now than we were in the period 2016-19, when the refusal or inability of a large part of the political class to implement the results of the largest vote in the nation's history, which they themselves had called and promised to implement, meant that the legitimacy of our democracy was under serious threat.
And we're considerably further away than we were in the late 1970s, when tens of millions of days were lost to strikes, rubbish was piling high in Leicester Square, the dead were going unburied and Northern Ireland was being, well, Northern Ireland.
But maybe I'm one of nature's optimists.
Sadly I think you are wrong, people here are mostly top 10% the world as it is works for them. There is growing anger and I am not top 10% I mix with these people daily. I think reform will be tried first then when it doesn't work as it wont then it will become civil conflict...the bottom 50% really don't have anything to lose
Here is an example, people here go on about people like nurses having to use a food bank....fair enough then they go on in other posts going lets just add a couple of percent on income tax....yeah well that person on min wage already struggling is going to have 20£ less each month.....2% extra for most here means I will buy a cheaper bottle of wine
The solution to the increasingly stretched and threadbare state is therefore, amongst other things, expressly not to keep jacking up income tax and national insurance, but to end the excessively lenient treatment of assets. That, and to better target benefits and tax breaks on those who really need it.
An older society is a poorer society, but that would be a lot easier to manage if more of the burden was shifted away from work and put onto capital, and if large quantities of tax receipts weren't needlessly squandered. To return to one of my favourite topics, I care about skint old people having enough to eat, but I'm against propping up the spending power of rich old people with taxation and wealth transfers that erode the living standards of poorer, younger ones. The hikes in taxes on work to raise billions to subsidise the booking of cruise holidays by asset millionaire pensioners must be stopped.
Well this awful government has whacked up inheritance tax on farmers, whacked up national insurance on business owners and slashed pensioners winter fuel allowance so some have been frozen this winter let alone going on cruise holidays
The idea pensioners are "freezing to death" because wealthier ones lost a benefit that has been less than their pension goes up each year is laughable and revealing that the attitude is that everyone else should go without so the special interest groups you favour can be kept in the comfort to which they've been accustomed while everyone else has got poorer so they could be protected. Selfishness off the scale.
Pensioners on just state pension and £13k a year ie less than minimum wage, have lost their winter fuel allowance this year and genuinely are at risk of serious illness like pneumonia. Reeves didn't just target millionaire OAPs on cruises.
It isn't selfishness, far from it, Reeves cutting WFA for such low income pensioners was immoral
Don't know where you are getting this nonsense from. There are many, many sources of help for those on low incomes.
The WFA was, in any case, a distraction from the main issue, and the incompetent way it was handled is emblematic of this accident prone Government.
The real problem is the triple lock, which is simply a gigantic wealth transfer mechanism that enriches pensioners at everyone else's expense.
The welfare system should concentrate primarily on helping those who need it most, who are the actual poor and disabled. Neither the country nor the poor bloody people in it can afford to stuff the mouths of a fifth of the population with gold. Not dying before the age of 66 means you got lucky, and isn't some special virtue that deserves to be endlessly rewarded.
When wages exceed both the rate of inflation and 2.5%, the pension gets jacked up so pensioners don't fall behind. When wages fall behind either of those values, which happens in most years, pensioners get richer relative to workers, at the same time as the pensioner population continues to increase as a percentage of the total. Over time, our living standards fall relative to theirs, and we are taxed more and more heavily to cover that expense. Effectively, we pay for the privilege of our own impoverishment. It is class warfare and the olds are winning.
The average pensioner household, after housing costs are taken into account, has a higher disposable income than the average working household, and that crossover point arrived some years ago. About 20% of all households headed by a pensioner have accumulated £1m or more in assets. Much of this is inevitable and a consequence of a working life paying off a mortgage and making savings and investments. And it's also true that many retirees are poor. But the blanket hiking of the state pension well ahead of the ability of the country to finance it has little to do with helping the poor, and a whole lot to do with the previous Government nailing down the votes of its core supporters. The fact that Labour ministers are so astonishingly thick that they can't grasp this - and are therefore prepared to maintain the guarantee, whilst desperately scrambling about to hike taxes and suppress spending almost everywhere else - makes me wonder what we have done as a country to deserve such consistently dreadful leadership.
But nevertheless that's where we are. There's another burst of inflation coming and, thanks to the idiot Reeves, a resumption of below inflation wage settlements courtesy of her jacking up employment taxes that businesses and their shareholders will simply pass straight on to the workforce. Our wages go down, our taxes go up, public services keep getting cut. But hey-ho, at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that millionaire pensioners in the stockbroker belt are going to get a nice raise at our expense, to cover such essentials as replacing last year's car with a newer model and buying the cat luxury food. Yippee.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
Wrap up warm, MD.
If you survive until midweek, it will get a lot warmer.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
Sorry to hear that! Would recommend hot water bottle if you need to stay home or trip to pub if not.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
Possibly add the rapid erosion of the rule of law in the US, replaced by Presidential dictat.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
We could talk about AI?
unemployment at the hand of robot overlords or a 1930 dystopia? 🤷
One way it is interesting is I used to work at that school and with the exception of one class the real problem was the children were so apathetic they used to sit in more or less dead silence.
So something has clearly changed pretty radically in the last decade. Lockdown will no doubt be blamed but I would suggest the abolition of tolls on the Severn Bridges leading to an outflux from Bristol plus the closure of the steelworks may have more to do with it.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
We could talk about AI?
unemployment at the hand of robot overlords or a 1930 dystopia? 🤷
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
We could talk about AI?
unemployment at the hand of robot overlords or a 1930 dystopia? 🤷
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
If there’s going to be an increase in defence spending, it needs to be spent on what’s actually going to be useful in a European land war.
Wartime spending looks very different to peacetime spending.
You need to prioritise quantity over quality, so loads of ammunition and production of current-tech systems, rather than spending $100bn on the study to investigate the replacement for the F35 which might be in service by 2050.
The exception for things which are new and cheap, such as small drones, where you keep a small DARPA-type group working on advancing the technology, and a facility ready to ramp production of whatever is the current tech at the time it’s needed. Once there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, buy their drone tech.
I would imagine that the immediate priority for extra spending would be to increase the quantity of infantry available as soon as possible. We're now being told that a huge number of troops are going to be needed to sit on the border of whatever is left of Ukraine, and currently we can deploy about 14. All those soldiers are going to have to be recruited, trained and paid, and I expect they will have to be seduced with a lot more than the minimum wage shite currently on offer to privates if the vacancies are going to be filled. Otherwise you're not going to get nearly enough volunteers to stand around in a freezing muddy field in eastern Europe for six months at a time, trying to make sure they don't get blown up by a landmine and keeping their fingers crossed that Vladimir doesn't decide that now's the time to finish what he started.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
We could talk about AI?
unemployment at the hand of robot overlords or a 1930 dystopia? 🤷
Or fully automated luxury communism?
There's about as much chance of our lives getting better from this point forward as there is of Elvis making a comeback tour.
One way it is interesting is I used to work at that school and with the exception of one class the real problem was the children were so apathetic they used to sit in more or less dead silence.
So something has clearly changed pretty radically in the last decade. Lockdown will no doubt be blamed but I would suggest the abolition of tolls on the Severn Bridges leading to an outflux from Bristol plus the closure of the steelworks may have more to do with it.
Pah, Saturday detentions are soft, ours were Sunday 2-4pm. That’s a suitably miserable punishment.
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
Silicon Valley arose due to US government defence spending. Could European rearmament lead to jobs at home and elusive economic growth at least for a few years until we’re all incinerated?
Seems Trump does believe in the rule of law which is why they are trying to sideline Zelensky but not Ukraine (however defined)
Medvedchuk — a close personal ally of Putin whom Putin initially wanted to install in place of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky following Russia's full-scale invasion — claimed during an interview Kremlin newswire TASS published on February 15 that Zelensky is the illegitimate leader of Ukraine and therefore that Zelensky cannot cancel the 2022 decree banning negotiations with Putin. Medvedchuk claimed that the only government body that can cancel the decree in the absence of a legitimate president is the Ukrainian Constitutional Court but that the court currently does not have the necessary quorum to make decision
So the Russian line that the present Ukrainian government is not legitimate, so Trump has to deal with the Ukrainian government in waiting in Russia.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
Possibly add the rapid erosion of the rule of law in the US, replaced by Presidential dictat.
The sheer surreal brazenness of the corruption on all levels in the New York case is amazing, but the DoJ's behaviour over TikTok is also clearly bizarre.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
If there’s going to be an increase in defence spending, it needs to be spent on what’s actually going to be useful in a European land war.
Wartime spending looks very different to peacetime spending.
You need to prioritise quantity over quality, so loads of ammunition and production of current-tech systems, rather than spending $100bn on the study to investigate the replacement for the F35 which might be in service by 2050.
The exception for things which are new and cheap, such as small drones, where you keep a small DARPA-type group working on advancing the technology, and a facility ready to ramp production of whatever is the current tech at the time it’s needed. Once there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, buy their drone tech.
You want a UK DOGE.
The Yanks want to halve defence spending.
That's what you'd get from a UK DOGE. I know you'll protest that it wouldn't happen, but defence is the sort of thing that can be very easy to cut.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
Apparently the fratboys terminated a bunch of the nuclear administration while they were transporting a 'physics package'
The death toll from these idiots is going to be yoooooooooge
Meanwhile Musk responded to Trump's Napoleon tweet (which he also probably wrote) with 14 flags, just in case there is a single person on Earth who hasn't got the message yet
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
If there’s going to be an increase in defence spending, it needs to be spent on what’s actually going to be useful in a European land war.
Wartime spending looks very different to peacetime spending.
You need to prioritise quantity over quality, so loads of ammunition and production of current-tech systems, rather than spending $100bn on the study to investigate the replacement for the F35 which might be in service by 2050.
The exception for things which are new and cheap, such as small drones, where you keep a small DARPA-type group working on advancing the technology, and a facility ready to ramp production of whatever is the current tech at the time it’s needed. Once there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, buy their drone tech.
You want a UK DOGE.
The Yanks want to halve defence spending.
That's what you'd get from a UK DOGE. I know you'll protest that it wouldn't happen, but defence is the sort of thing that can be very easy to cut.
Oh, it's Tommy This and Tommy That and 'Chuck 'im out, the brute'....
I know that's unpopular and the pathetic plastic patriots will screech about leaving the country, but if we want increased defence spending *and* to fix some of the stuff that's broken, then DOGE or yet more austerity/efficiency savings really won't get us there.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
Apparently the fratboys terminated a bunch of the nuclear administration while they were transporting a 'physics package'
The death toll from these idiots is going to be yoooooooooge
Meanwhile Musk responded to Trump's Napoleon tweet (which he also probably wrote) with 14 flags, just in case there is a single person on Earth who hasn't got the message yet
What parallel was Trump seeking - that he's a criminal hiding behind a veneer of constitutionality, or that he has a cock less than two inches long?
German election update with a week to go: There's been a few opinion polls in the last couple of days, which show little movement.
The most significant change over the last weeks has been a rise in support for the Left, and a fall for the BSW. It's small numbers, just a couple of percent, but it could decide which of them clears the 5% hurdle. It was looking like the BSW would make it and the Left wouldn't, but now pretty much swapped places.
How easy it is for the CDU/CSU to form a coalition looks like it will largely depend on how many of the 3 parties around 5% (Linke, BSW, FDP) make it. 0 make it = Union + SPD, or Union + Greens should both be a majority 1 makes it = Union + SPD very likely, Union + Greens probably 2 make it = Union + SPD coin toss, Union + Greens probably not 3 make it = Probably neither.
Of course, Union + Greens seems anyway less likely given the rhetoric from both camps, but it hasn't been ruled out, and its availability as an alternative gives CDU/CSU a better negotiating position in coalition talks with the SDP.
Another 3-way coalition would be a nightmare, with the government again unable to get anything done. Both Union + SPD + Greens, and Union + SPD + FDP look hopeless.
Most likely outcome: CDU/CSU most votes/seats, and go on to form a government in coalition with the SPD with Merz as chancellor.
So in a nutshell, on today’s menu we have Munich appeasement of tyrannical Putin, rearmament across Europe and the death of Conservative Party at home.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
We could talk about AI?
unemployment at the hand of robot overlords or a 1930 dystopia? 🤷
Or fully automated luxury communism?
There's about as much chance of our lives getting better from this point forward as there is of Elvis making a comeback tour.
Pigeon’s Lament
Pigeon paced the Narrow Room - The Sun refused to stay - The Clock betrayed the breath of Noon, And turned its Face away
Livermore - had left before - Or so the Shadows tell - Yet Pigeon - waits - upon the step - As if he heard the Bell
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
Apparently the fratboys terminated a bunch of the nuclear administration while they were transporting a 'physics package'
The death toll from these idiots is going to be yoooooooooge
Meanwhile Musk responded to Trump's Napoleon tweet (which he also probably wrote) with 14 flags, just in case there is a single person on Earth who hasn't got the message yet
Didn't you read yesterday's thread? Their dismissal was all a conspiracy to make DOGE look bad...
DOGE are evil fuckwits. The people defending them are worse.
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
Apparently the fratboys terminated a bunch of the nuclear administration while they were transporting a 'physics package'
The death toll from these idiots is going to be yoooooooooge
Meanwhile Musk responded to Trump's Napoleon tweet (which he also probably wrote) with 14 flags, just in case there is a single person on Earth who hasn't got the message yet
What parallel was Trump seeking - that he's a criminal hiding behind a veneer of constitutionality, or that he has a cock less than two inches long?
Allegedly the reason Elon doesn't shag all his baby mothers is that he had a botched penis implant.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Perhaps scrapping the two large aircraft carriers that provide zero defence to the European theatre would be a better use of resources.
Give them to Mauritius instead of cash for the Diego Garcia lease?
The doge gutting of the American Bureaucracy is what reform wants to do here.... watch what happens in the states and remember for the 2029 parliamentary elections.
Apparently the fratboys terminated a bunch of the nuclear administration while they were transporting a 'physics package'
The death toll from these idiots is going to be yoooooooooge
Meanwhile Musk responded to Trump's Napoleon tweet (which he also probably wrote) with 14 flags, just in case there is a single person on Earth who hasn't got the message yet
What parallel was Trump seeking - that he's a criminal hiding behind a veneer of constitutionality, or that he has a cock less than two inches long?
Allegedly the reason Elon doesn't shag all his baby mothers is that he had a botched penis implant.
That's surprising for a man so remarkably good at cocking up everywhere.
At this time any sensible countries with good universities would be looking down the back of the sofa for some cash and offering funding to those top universities to subtly approach a lot of these research projects that are being gutted by Musk and friends and poaching them.
The UK should of course be in the optimal position with the ratings of Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial globally and language/cultural similarities but inevitably we will miss out as we need the money to give to Mauritius. Australia could do well and I would imagine Switzerland could make a good case to move there.
Good, but it needs to be a sizeable increase. Going to 2.5% or 2.7% or something like that will just hurt the public finances without yielding much increase in capability.
Like many things the government does, it would be prudent to ask what the MOD is actually going to do with the extra cash. An awful lot of taxpayers money currently goes into MOD procurement, often getting spent on what looks more like social security for UK defence contractors and Scottish shipyards than things useful for fighting in an actual hot war. The sagas we get to hear about such as the Ajax APCs (over 8 years late, at least 20% over budget) or the Nimrod upgrades (scrapped £3.5bn into the program) suggest that the procurement is probably the worst bits of the process state in action.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
One if the advantages of increasing defence spending during a war is that you have a slightly better idea of priorities, and what doesn't work. And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around. Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
Perhaps scrapping the two large aircraft carriers that provide zero defence to the European theatre would be a better use of resources.
Give them to Mauritius instead of cash for the Diego Garcia lease?
This isn't ideal for the pro Mauritius wing of the UK government.
Comments
He reminded me of Lady Gaga who (possibly at Glastonbury) expressed surprise from the stage at how so many fans had been motivated to turn up to listen to her music in the pouring rain and all the mud. Then, she said, she realised how willing the punters were to "suffer for their love of music".
Two moments when the performer on the stage practically gave voice to their thoughts that OMFG what is wrong with you lot for looking up to me - if I gave you a shit sandwich and told you it was a bowl of custard you'd probably believe me.
https://x.com/hendopolis/status/1890893574751100979
https://unherd.com/2025/01/is-elon-the-new-enoch/
There are obvious reasons for this - as a President could simply, as Trump is doing, effectively override any decision made by Congress without changing the law. Or you can simply cut off those you perceive as political opponents. NOAA puts out a hurricane forecast you don't like, bye, CDC says bird flu is getting bad and you want to ignore them. Tata. That's a mental way to run a country.
It would also avoid the chaos Trump is creating whereby everyone from scientists and doctors to farmers has seen money they'd budgeted for disappear, not knowing if it will come back at all - or in some cases pretty much knowing it won't as their work has been wrecked beyond repair overnight.
So while he does have a mandate for say, tariffs or withdrawing political support from Ukraine, as they are within his executive powers, he doesn't for Musk's actions. If he went to Congress and said "I want to shut down these programmes and agencies" and they voted that through then he would. He hasn't, so they haven't.
It's rather like if Keir Starmer, having said some taxes would have to rise, unilaterally, without going to parliament or passing a law to that effect said HMRC would now be collecting a 20% supertax on any registered Tory donor. He wouldn't have a mandate for it, and it wouldn't be something that would or should be legal. Sadly America has pretty much lost the rule of law so Musk and Trump will likely get away with it until voters feel the consequences.
As for Reform, they couldn’t run a bath but presumably their idea of defence spending is an actual fence with some nets in the Channel pace Braverman.
I was quite taken aback when people used the first example and I was also taken aside and asked never to use the second phrase ever again when I innocently used it to say I think I wished to have some sort of Asian food.
I've very little confidence tipping an extra £60bn a year into this black hole will do much to enhance our fighting capability, although it will probably work wonder for BAE's balance sheet.
I suppose we can always remind future generations, much as we did with Covid, it was an emergency and vital to keep us alive and safe, as for the crippling future debt interest repayments…..
It’s what you do to finance wars or preparation for them. You can’t expect to rewire the public finances fast enough, but you do take a hit on the back end.
We can’t increase taxes really, so basically it’s a base of dropping the triple lock and benefits, and some charging for NHS services.
Empty Wigs by Jonathan Meades – a black museum of savage stories
Encompassing eugenics, euthanasia and terrorism, this dark, sprawling novel by a man of many talents is not for the easily offended"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/10/empty-wigs-by-jonathan-meades-review-a-black-museum-of-savage-stories
I’m forced to agree we can’t change the world as quick as the world seems to change. To be fair, in times of “war” or national crisis, Governments have taken some pretty drastic action to try to help fund the crisis.
Someone will tell me I’m wrong but income tax came in to fund the Napoleonic Wars and if 5% of GDP on defence is to become the “new normal” we need to think or rethink how we can fill the gap and I don’t support borrowing ad infinitum.
To be blunt, I think taxes should rise and arguing it’s necessary for our defence might be compelling. I don’t think we can fund all £60 billion by tax rises but we can go some way now to ensure future generations aren’t crippled by debt interest repayments.
Whether we are taking about finding cash for defence or education/potholes/AI the same constraints are there. Health spending cannot grow forever, and nor can pensions or welfare. Taxation can do a bit, but we need to do some thinking about our social contract.
For example, I am starting to think that because my work pension means I should not need a state pension, maybe I ought not to get one? As a quid pro quo maybe I can have boosted unemployment cash if it all goes a bit wrong for me, to get me to the next job?
USA vs. Canada started off in MADNESS
https://x.com/espn/status/1890939152880783504
It seems more rational to work out what we actually need and then allocate the cash.
The party is appealing to a socially conservative base at the cost of its more liberal-minded voters.
By Ben Walker"
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/polling/2025/02/labours-progressive-centre-has-collapsed
The issue isn’t with farmers paying IHT, the issue is that it is undermining the viability of a category of small businesses. They have high asset value but not much cash flow.
As for the liberal minded Labour voters, they have other options if they find Labour is no longer for them.
"The NTSB held another press conference about the DCA collision yesterday. Lots of focus on the altitudes of the helicopter, and while we know the helicopter was at 278feet based on its radar altimeter, investigators don’t know what altitude was displayed to crew.
Did you know that the threshold for altimeter accuracy suggested by the AIM is 75 feet?
The routes along the river literally didn’t have enough margin for error."
https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1890872071082922112
75 foot difference is okay when at thousands of feet. Not so okay when having to navigate in a corridor only 200 foot hight, with 0 being the ground...
(*) I believe there are two, of different types?
And we're already halfway through a defence review.
So we'll probably be slightly less inefficient/profligate this time around.
Fir example, we might actually buy more than two days worth of munitions for our weapons systems.
https://www.gov.uk/pension-credit/eligibility
They carry a baggage which would be there if they were newly coined. That's just how language works.
"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."
Not true.
A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That's much, much harder than it sounds.
What I'm about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.
https://x.com/ChadNauseam/status/1890889465322786878
That's what the increase in the debt limit is about.
Wartime spending looks very different to peacetime spending.
You need to prioritise quantity over quality, so loads of ammunition and production of current-tech systems, rather than spending $100bn on the study to investigate the replacement for the F35 which might be in service by 2050.
The exception for things which are new and cheap, such as small drones, where you keep a small DARPA-type group working on advancing the technology, and a facility ready to ramp production of whatever is the current tech at the time it’s needed. Once there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, buy their drone tech.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-giant-warships-sinking-britains-budget/
Boiler's not heating the radiators, though hot water still runs. Hoping this can be fixed today. Not below freezing (1-4 Celsius is the range) but still not great.
It's actually snowing here in Cannock.
For example, one thing you've not mentioned is the likelihood we're going to have to deploy thousands of troops to Ukraine. Enforcing a ceasefire will be a great deal cheaper than actually fighting a war, but it's going to cost.
Right now that capacity doesn't exist.
The real problem is the triple lock, which is simply a gigantic wealth transfer mechanism that enriches pensioners at everyone else's expense.
The welfare system should concentrate primarily on helping those who need it most, who are the actual poor and disabled. Neither the country nor the poor bloody people in it can afford to stuff the mouths of a fifth of the population with gold. Not dying before the age of 66 means you got lucky, and isn't some special virtue that deserves to be endlessly rewarded.
When wages exceed both the rate of inflation and 2.5%, the pension gets jacked up so pensioners don't fall behind. When wages fall behind either of those values, which happens in most years, pensioners get richer relative to workers, at the same time as the pensioner population continues to increase as a percentage of the total. Over time, our living standards fall relative to theirs, and we are taxed more and more heavily to cover that expense. Effectively, we pay for the privilege of our own impoverishment. It is class warfare and the olds are winning.
The average pensioner household, after housing costs are taken into account, has a higher disposable income than the average working household, and that crossover point arrived some years ago. About 20% of all households headed by a pensioner have accumulated £1m or more in assets. Much of this is inevitable and a consequence of a working life paying off a mortgage and making savings and investments. And it's also true that many retirees are poor. But the blanket hiking of the state pension well ahead of the ability of the country to finance it has little to do with helping the poor, and a whole lot to do with the previous Government nailing down the votes of its core supporters. The fact that Labour ministers are so astonishingly thick that they can't grasp this - and are therefore prepared to maintain the guarantee, whilst desperately scrambling about to hike taxes and suppress spending almost everywhere else - makes me wonder what we have done as a country to deserve such consistently dreadful leadership.
But nevertheless that's where we are. There's another burst of inflation coming and, thanks to the idiot Reeves, a resumption of below inflation wage settlements courtesy of her jacking up employment taxes that businesses and their shareholders will simply pass straight on to the workforce. Our wages go down, our taxes go up, public services keep getting cut. But hey-ho, at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that millionaire pensioners in the stockbroker belt are going to get a nice raise at our expense, to cover such essentials as replacing last year's car with a newer model and buying the cat luxury food. Yippee.
Does anyone remember when we used to argue about bus lanes on the M4 or the tax on a Cornish pasty?
If you survive until midweek, it will get a lot warmer.
The Thursday Night Massacre(s)
Two very different episodes on Thursday provide growing evidence of a Department of Justice that is showing less respect, by the day, for the rule of law.
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/124-the-thursday-night-massacres
Then the bird said “Livermore.”
Edgar Allan PBoe.
Not too bad right now. Luckily, the computer room is the warmest in the house.
This is an interesting story, on several levels:
School plagued by bad behaviour brings in Saturday detentions
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg8yx4xj3no
One way it is interesting is I used to work at that school and with the exception of one class the real problem was the children were so apathetic they used to sit in more or less dead silence.
So something has clearly changed pretty radically in the last decade. Lockdown will no doubt be blamed but I would suggest the abolition of tolls on the Severn Bridges leading to an outflux from Bristol plus the closure of the steelworks may have more to do with it.
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
No more, return no more!
O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, Livermore, return!
So the Russian line that the present Ukrainian government is not legitimate, so Trump has to deal with the Ukrainian government in waiting in Russia.
The Yanks want to halve defence spending.
That's what you'd get from a UK DOGE. I know you'll protest that it wouldn't happen, but defence is the sort of thing that can be very easy to cut.
The death toll from these idiots is going to be yoooooooooge
Meanwhile Musk responded to Trump's Napoleon tweet (which he also probably wrote) with 14 flags, just in case there is a single person on Earth who hasn't got the message yet
DOGE share classified information with the whole world.
I know that's unpopular and the pathetic plastic patriots will screech about leaving the country, but if we want increased defence spending *and* to fix some of the stuff that's broken, then DOGE or yet more austerity/efficiency savings really won't get us there.
There's been a few opinion polls in the last couple of days, which show little movement.
The most significant change over the last weeks has been a rise in support for the Left, and a fall for the BSW. It's small numbers, just a couple of percent, but it could decide which of them clears the 5% hurdle. It was looking like the BSW would make it and the Left wouldn't, but now pretty much swapped places.
How easy it is for the CDU/CSU to form a coalition looks like it will largely depend on how many of the 3 parties around 5% (Linke, BSW, FDP) make it.
0 make it = Union + SPD, or Union + Greens should both be a majority
1 makes it = Union + SPD very likely, Union + Greens probably
2 make it = Union + SPD coin toss, Union + Greens probably not
3 make it = Probably neither.
Of course, Union + Greens seems anyway less likely given the rhetoric from both camps, but it hasn't been ruled out, and its availability as an alternative gives CDU/CSU a better negotiating position in coalition talks with the SDP.
Another 3-way coalition would be a nightmare, with the government again unable to get anything done. Both Union + SPD + Greens, and Union + SPD + FDP look hopeless.
Most likely outcome: CDU/CSU most votes/seats, and go on to form a government in coalition with the SPD with Merz as chancellor.
Pigeon paced the Narrow Room -
The Sun refused to stay -
The Clock betrayed the breath of Noon,
And turned its Face away
Livermore - had left before -
Or so the Shadows tell -
Yet Pigeon - waits - upon the step -
As if he heard the Bell
DOGE are evil fuckwits. The people defending them are worse.
The UK should of course be in the optimal position with the ratings of Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial globally and language/cultural similarities but inevitably we will miss out as we need the money to give to Mauritius. Australia could do well and I would imagine Switzerland could make a good case to move there.
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/former-mauritius-prime-minister-detained-says-financial-crimes-commission-2025-02-16/