White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
I think most British people don't care about race, but they do care about values and culture, and extreme forms of religion.
I agree, mostly.
Someone posted upthread that the last two Tory leaders had not been “White British”, and I had to think for a moment who they were referring to.
However, race and culture are decently correlated.
We lack an acceptable way of talking about this. Legitimate cultural concerns without morally unacceptable concepts of racial inferiority.
I think I disagree with you. As I have repeated many times on here before, one of the most English men I ever met was an Indian born in Uganda whose family came to Britain when he was a child as part of the Amin exodus. There is simply no way you would ever have known he was not white English from what he said or wrote. I consider him one of my greatest friends from my time at work. Sadly he suffered severe brain damage in a car accident a few years ago.
But I genuinely believe, based on more than 50 years of friendships and associations, that being culturally British/English has nothing at all to do with race.
I am sorry to hear about your friend. As it happens my grandmother was half Indian, born in Chennai (ie, Madras), which of course makes me 1/8.
I agree that being British has nothing to do with race, and it’s one of the best things about British identity that it can be adopted flexibly.
However, the issue is not individuals. The issue is aggregate, mass and rapid cultural change.
Cultural change is not new.
I am the same ethnicity as my parents, grandparents and sons, but we have very different cultures.
I didn't really have any contact with anyone non-white until I went to Medical School in South London. At first it seemed quite alien, but over time it became normality and I cringe now at some of my attitudes to race, religion or homosexuality, though these were fairly mainstream in the Eighties.
It's the same now. It's no coincidence that the strongest Reform polling is in those parts of the country where there are fewest immigrants. It is fear of otherness.
Modern British racists are more culturally racist than strictly by ethnic descent. The number of people who openly object to the Conservative leader on racial grounds seems close to zero, because she sounds exactly like white leaders of all parties. Indeed, the Shadow Cabinet as a whole is impressively diverse in strict ethnic terms.
The difficulty arises when someone sounds different and has different cultural assumptions. Some of them really don't matter - who really cares whether curry is more popular than 30 years ago? Other assumptions - e.g. the role of women - matter more, though they themselves change over time. If immigration is limited the changes are mostly towards the British tradition, and thus comfortably viewed by Brits. If immigration is large-scale, that may be different. We shouldn't assume that our traditions are necessarily better, but it's certainly less comfortable to challenge them.
To some extent this is best handled by accepting that there are different cultural traditions, and one may prefer one or another, and supporting the right of individuals to change without necessarily assuming that they *should*. It's a subtle business, unsuited to slogans and instinctive reactions.
All the evidnece shows that you are clearly wrong on this. I accept that culture changes all the time and that is not abad thing at all. But when dealing with and acepting large scale migration as Western Countries are currently doing it is clear that the best way of coping with this is insisting that the set of values and laws held by the host country are the ones that are enforced and have to be accepted by those arriving from elsewhere. Even if that runs counter to their own religious beliefs.
The rights of women and minorities, free speech, animal welfare (I pick that one particularly for you Nick) and the supremacy of local laws must be enforced. Cultural relativism of the type you advocate here simply does not work. The comparison between Norway and Sweden is instructive here.
I'd agree that the supremacy of the host country's laws must be fully accepted by incomers. However, you then add 'values', which I don't quite agree with - especially as you cite the importance of free speech in your last paragraph. For example, equality for women, and for gay people, are values that are to some extent are enshrined in law. But there are lots of people in this country who are not immigrants who don't believe in equality for those groups, who don't share these values. yet we tolerate that in the name of free speech as long as it's not unlawful. I don't see why immigrants should be treated differently from home-grown traditionalists. In short - I don't think you and Nick are as far apart as you suggest.
A vignette
I was running a team. For some reason the team knees up was organised by HR (I forget why)
They proudly announced that we were going to a halal curry shop. Two of the team said they wouldn’t go.
HR went on the war path - who were these two so they could be sacked as racists?
They were Indian Hindus who told a story of how, back in the day, the Muslim rulers of the their state had tried to impose halal etc. To them being told to eat it was cultural imperialism.
HR backed off, discombobulated.
Who was right and wrong here, and why?
The basic error there is HR listening to the voices in their head from the assumptions of their own belief / training, rather than to the members of the team by consultation with a team leader who they encourage to reflect and guide them in the context. It sounds as if they made blanket assumptions about people being Muslims.
Similar confusion happens when, for example, the majority of Iranians in California are Christian, or Westerners run up against the full social complexity of Indian society. Take them to Nagaland.
I had a similar issue that required careful navigation when I ran an interdenominational lunch group / prayer group at my workplace for 5 years.
That national organisation - the only one that existed supporting around 300 groups in the UK - was founded from within the Independent Evangelical sector (as the War Time Christian Union in 1942 approx), and was strongly and narrowly Evangelical enough that Roman Catholics were not allowed to be formal members by policy of the national organisation. The policy stated that RCs needed to be "saved".
Equally my workplace group had existed since 1956 (this was 199x), so I was not about to create a huge fuss whilst I sought to make the group more open to all and more visible. Creating a group of 4 people meeting once a week in a room is easy; doing things like running a magazine in a workplace is far more challenging.
The Ecumenical Movement has been developing principles around how to deal with such circumstances since it started at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910.
Being on the "secular" side of the sacred-secular divide was interesting - it means that there were all sorts of people, removed from the Church situation, and my contacts list was around 100 individuals with known church affiliation. But they were in the habit of relating in terms of "work", not often in terms of "thinking about work using their faith".
In the event, I adopted a policy of saying the traditioaln "grace" - "in the name of the Father, the Son etc" which is in everyone's Bible, and a set of emphases from a book about ecumenism written by George Carey. So, a policy of identifying by the centre, and not by defining edges.
For the team event, I would aim to do similar.
Politically, you'll note that the sectarians of whatever stripe - whether Yaxley-Lennon, Jenrick, JD Vance, or Islamists drive wedges and create division to drive hostility and division, not dialogue and respect.
Lying about the "other" is easy to get away with if you succeed in driving wedges by talking to your target ethnic group. Jenrick going to an ethnic area of Birmingham to create his film about dirty immigrants with rubbish in the streets, whilst saying nothing about his Government, and him personally, having shredded resources for local authorities, sticks out a mile.
Should be no catering to religion at work , any halfwit who does not like it can piss off. practice their religion all they want in their own house otherwise Foff.
I noticed today that the BBC now calls the Palestinians released in the hostage exchange "inmates"
I find that quite peculiar
Aren't they convicted criminals serving sentences?
Some (some likely terrorist murderers); most not. … Of the Palestinian prisoners released on Saturday, 333 had been captured or arrested in Gaza since the beginning of the war. They were taken straight to the territory. Thirty-six Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails were also released. ..
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
I think most British people don't care about race, but they do care about values and culture, and extreme forms of religion.
I agree, mostly.
Someone posted upthread that the last two Tory leaders had not been “White British”, and I had to think for a moment who they were referring to.
However, race and culture are decently correlated.
We lack an acceptable way of talking about this. Legitimate cultural concerns without morally unacceptable concepts of racial inferiority.
I think I disagree with you. As I have repeated many times on here before, one of the most English men I ever met was an Indian born in Uganda whose family came to Britain when he was a child as part of the Amin exodus. There is simply no way you would ever have known he was not white English from what he said or wrote. I consider him one of my greatest friends from my time at work. Sadly he suffered severe brain damage in a car accident a few years ago.
But I genuinely believe, based on more than 50 years of friendships and associations, that being culturally British/English has nothing at all to do with race.
I am sorry to hear about your friend. As it happens my grandmother was half Indian, born in Chennai (ie, Madras), which of course makes me 1/8.
I agree that being British has nothing to do with race, and it’s one of the best things about British identity that it can be adopted flexibly.
However, the issue is not individuals. The issue is aggregate, mass and rapid cultural change.
Cultural change is not new.
I am the same ethnicity as my parents, grandparents and sons, but we have very different cultures.
I didn't really have any contact with anyone non-white until I went to Medical School in South London. At first it seemed quite alien, but over time it became normality and I cringe now at some of my attitudes to race, religion or homosexuality, though these were fairly mainstream in the Eighties.
It's the same now. It's no coincidence that the strongest Reform polling is in those parts of the country where there are fewest immigrants. It is fear of otherness.
Modern British racists are more culturally racist than strictly by ethnic descent. The number of people who openly object to the Conservative leader on racial grounds seems close to zero, because she sounds exactly like white leaders of all parties. Indeed, the Shadow Cabinet as a whole is impressively diverse in strict ethnic terms.
The difficulty arises when someone sounds different and has different cultural assumptions. Some of them really don't matter - who really cares whether curry is more popular than 30 years ago? Other assumptions - e.g. the role of women - matter more, though they themselves change over time. If immigration is limited the changes are mostly towards the British tradition, and thus comfortably viewed by Brits. If immigration is large-scale, that may be different. We shouldn't assume that our traditions are necessarily better, but it's certainly less comfortable to challenge them.
To some extent this is best handled by accepting that there are different cultural traditions, and one may prefer one or another, and supporting the right of individuals to change without necessarily assuming that they *should*. It's a subtle business, unsuited to slogans and instinctive reactions.
All the evidnece shows that you are clearly wrong on this. I accept that culture changes all the time and that is not abad thing at all. But when dealing with and acepting large scale migration as Western Countries are currently doing it is clear that the best way of coping with this is insisting that the set of values and laws held by the host country are the ones that are enforced and have to be accepted by those arriving from elsewhere. Even if that runs counter to their own religious beliefs.
The rights of women and minorities, free speech, animal welfare (I pick that one particularly for you Nick) and the supremacy of local laws must be enforced. Cultural relativism of the type you advocate here simply does not work. The comparison between Norway and Sweden is instructive here.
I'd agree that the supremacy of the host country's laws must be fully accepted by incomers. However, you then add 'values', which I don't quite agree with - especially as you cite the importance of free speech in your last paragraph. For example, equality for women, and for gay people, are values that are to some extent are enshrined in law. But there are lots of people in this country who are not immigrants who don't believe in equality for those groups, who don't share these values. yet we tolerate that in the name of free speech as long as it's not unlawful. I don't see why immigrants should be treated differently from home-grown traditionalists. In short - I don't think you and Nick are as far apart as you suggest.
A vignette
I was running a team. For some reason the team knees up was organised by HR (I forget why)
They proudly announced that we were going to a halal curry shop. Two of the team said they wouldn’t go.
HR went on the war path - who were these two so they could be sacked as racists?
They were Indian Hindus who told a story of how, back in the day, the Muslim rulers of the their state had tried to impose halal etc. To them being told to eat it was cultural imperialism.
HR backed off, discombobulated.
Who was right and wrong here, and why?
I find the creeping normalisation of halal a bit uncomfortable, to be honest. It strikes me as rather less humane a form if butchery than mught be ideal. Though I may be ill-informed here.
Apologies for the clear whataboutery, but halal concerns me much less than the butchery that goes on in mass producing meat for our supermarkets.
What does concern me is anyone from any background who feels so beholden to their cultural roots and/or beliefs that they cannot compromise when compromise is clearly needed.
So in Malmesbury's vignette: HR were wrong for choosing a halal eatery for a culturally diverse team, the two team member who refused to eat there were wrong for equating a slightly ham-fisted attempt by HR to be culturally aware with cultural imperialism, and Malmesbury was definitely wrong for allowing HR to organise the curry.
I didn’t allow them. It was some kind of cost reduction policy (I *think*, was a long time back). Rather than let teams set their own entertainment, centralise it with The Experts.
The two team members were offended by the idea of eating halal. As simple as that.
Did they have the right to be offended?
I must admit enjoying the idiots torpedoing themselves.
Some experts, dunderheids more like.
“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
H.M.G deserve more respect. Not all of them claim to be experts.
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
No, it’s not Britain, as I understand it
in the end a country is its culture and civilization and language and shared collective memory, what it feels itself to be
Mountains and landscapes and rivers and mighty forests are all great, but they do not make a nation. A nation is its people, and for them to prosper, or even exist, some crucial things must be shared
A Britain that is, say, 25% Muslim and 25% Hindu and 25% “other” and the white British - self identified - as the remaining quarter, is not the Britain I know and love. It might be great (I doubt it) it might be a disaster, it doesn’t even matter, it would not be the Britain I grew up in, nothing like it, and I find that deeply sad. And that is where we are heading on these numbers
That’s what I feel. Personally. And yet for some reason saying this is virtually a cancellable offence whereas for any other nation in earth it would be obvious common sense. Would the Saudis allow themselves to become a religious/ethnic minority in their own country? The Afghans? The Poles? The Russians? Anyone??
The first country you reach for is Saudi, where about 40% of the population are non-citizens. In Qatar it's around 90%.
If British should mean white, then non-white people shouldn't be considered British. A statement implies its contrapositive. There's also the assumption that it's okay to classify every person as either white or non-white.
Your position seems to be straight out of chapter 3 of volume 2 of Mein Kampf.
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
There's no need to bridle or issue warnings. That chapter in Mein Kampf advocates a setup where the population is divided into citizens (ethnic Germans), subjects (people of other ethnicities who are allowed to live in Germany but who aren't what Germany is all about), and foreigners (citizens of foreign states).
I'm not saying you are "equivalent" to Hitler. I'm saying that your position regarding what makes a nation and what a country's citizenship policy should be is the same as what Hitler advocates in that chapter of Mein Kampf. It is. Am I being unfair?
If that were already considered by almost everyone to be "the natural way of things" and "how things have always been", there'd have been no need for Hitler to advocate it.
The chapter is about 1000 words long. What do you disagree with in it?
Hitler considered that Germans of Jewish, Polish, Sorbish, Wendish, and gypsy origin were untermenschen despite being indistinguishable from “Aryans.”
Those who are encouraging the racists in order to get at one race (usually, but not always, Muslims) should realise that the racists they are emboldening will, if given power, not stop at that one race.
Why do you conflate race and Islam?
Are you saying Islamophobia's okay because you don't see it as 'racist' ?
I would say that Islamophobia is OK because Islam is a religion and hence an ideology. It's no different to being a socialist-o-phobe or conservative-o-phobe. We are entitled to dislike ideologies we disagree with, and their proponents.
But... of course most Muslims are members of non-white ethnic minorities, so separating it out from racism is tricky
Would you say anti-Semitism is OK because Judaism is a religion and hence an ideology? Or anti-Christian bigotry?
That's the point: it doesn't matter when the asshats with funny moustaches and salutes put you in the cattle wagons to the camp. If you're different - whether you are Jewish, disabled, Roma, black, slav, whatever - then you're in trouble.
Anti-semitism clearly isn't a disagreement with the tenets of Judaism.
Though disagreeing with a basic tenet of Judaism that Israel is land promised to Jews by God is often portrayed as antisemitic.
It's often accompanied by blood curdling cries for Israel's destruction
What about all the times when it’s not accompanied by blood curdling cries for Israel's destruction?
Who cares if you say it's not the promised land?
As long as you don't think that Palestine should be from the river to the sea - ie no Israel
What about those that say Israel should be from the river to the sea? Does that count as *checks notes* blood curdling cries for Palestine’s destruction?
I know you're not asking me, but IMV yes. There are nutters on both (all?) sides of that particular conflict.
I would suggest that there are between 6 and 12 sides to that conflict. Most of whom hate each other. Especially when they appear to on the same side.
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.
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
I think most British people don't care about race, but they do care about values and culture, and extreme forms of religion.
I agree, mostly.
Someone posted upthread that the last two Tory leaders had not been “White British”, and I had to think for a moment who they were referring to.
However, race and culture are decently correlated.
We lack an acceptable way of talking about this. Legitimate cultural concerns without morally unacceptable concepts of racial inferiority.
I think I disagree with you. As I have repeated many times on here before, one of the most English men I ever met was an Indian born in Uganda whose family came to Britain when he was a child as part of the Amin exodus. There is simply no way you would ever have known he was not white English from what he said or wrote. I consider him one of my greatest friends from my time at work. Sadly he suffered severe brain damage in a car accident a few years ago.
But I genuinely believe, based on more than 50 years of friendships and associations, that being culturally British/English has nothing at all to do with race.
I am sorry to hear about your friend. As it happens my grandmother was half Indian, born in Chennai (ie, Madras), which of course makes me 1/8.
I agree that being British has nothing to do with race, and it’s one of the best things about British identity that it can be adopted flexibly.
However, the issue is not individuals. The issue is aggregate, mass and rapid cultural change.
Cultural change is not new.
I am the same ethnicity as my parents, grandparents and sons, but we have very different cultures.
I didn't really have any contact with anyone non-white until I went to Medical School in South London. At first it seemed quite alien, but over time it became normality and I cringe now at some of my attitudes to race, religion or homosexuality, though these were fairly mainstream in the Eighties.
It's the same now. It's no coincidence that the strongest Reform polling is in those parts of the country where there are fewest immigrants. It is fear of otherness.
Modern British racists are more culturally racist than strictly by ethnic descent. The number of people who openly object to the Conservative leader on racial grounds seems close to zero, because she sounds exactly like white leaders of all parties. Indeed, the Shadow Cabinet as a whole is impressively diverse in strict ethnic terms.
The difficulty arises when someone sounds different and has different cultural assumptions. Some of them really don't matter - who really cares whether curry is more popular than 30 years ago? Other assumptions - e.g. the role of women - matter more, though they themselves change over time. If immigration is limited the changes are mostly towards the British tradition, and thus comfortably viewed by Brits. If immigration is large-scale, that may be different. We shouldn't assume that our traditions are necessarily better, but it's certainly less comfortable to challenge them.
To some extent this is best handled by accepting that there are different cultural traditions, and one may prefer one or another, and supporting the right of individuals to change without necessarily assuming that they *should*. It's a subtle business, unsuited to slogans and instinctive reactions.
All the evidnece shows that you are clearly wrong on this. I accept that culture changes all the time and that is not abad thing at all. But when dealing with and acepting large scale migration as Western Countries are currently doing it is clear that the best way of coping with this is insisting that the set of values and laws held by the host country are the ones that are enforced and have to be accepted by those arriving from elsewhere. Even if that runs counter to their own religious beliefs.
The rights of women and minorities, free speech, animal welfare (I pick that one particularly for you Nick) and the supremacy of local laws must be enforced. Cultural relativism of the type you advocate here simply does not work. The comparison between Norway and Sweden is instructive here.
I'd agree that the supremacy of the host country's laws must be fully accepted by incomers. However, you then add 'values', which I don't quite agree with - especially as you cite the importance of free speech in your last paragraph. For example, equality for women, and for gay people, are values that are to some extent are enshrined in law. But there are lots of people in this country who are not immigrants who don't believe in equality for those groups, who don't share these values. yet we tolerate that in the name of free speech as long as it's not unlawful. I don't see why immigrants should be treated differently from home-grown traditionalists. In short - I don't think you and Nick are as far apart as you suggest.
A vignette
I was running a team. For some reason the team knees up was organised by HR (I forget why)
They proudly announced that we were going to a halal curry shop. Two of the team said they wouldn’t go.
HR went on the war path - who were these two so they could be sacked as racists?
They were Indian Hindus who told a story of how, back in the day, the Muslim rulers of the their state had tried to impose halal etc. To them being told to eat it was cultural imperialism.
HR backed off, discombobulated.
Who was right and wrong here, and why?
I find the creeping normalisation of halal a bit uncomfortable, to be honest. It strikes me as rather less humane a form if butchery than mught be ideal. Though I may be ill-informed here.
Apologies for the clear whataboutery, but halal concerns me much less than the butchery that goes on in mass producing meat for our supermarkets.
What does concern me is anyone from any background who feels so beholden to their cultural roots and/or beliefs that they cannot compromise when compromise is clearly needed.
So in Malmesbury's vignette: HR were wrong for choosing a halal eatery for a culturally diverse team, the two team member who refused to eat there were wrong for equating a slightly ham-fisted attempt by HR to be culturally aware with cultural imperialism, and Malmesbury was definitely wrong for allowing HR to organise the curry.
I didn’t allow them. It was some kind of cost reduction policy (I *think*, was a long time back). Rather than let teams set their own entertainment, centralise it with The Experts.
The two team members were offended by the idea of eating halal. As simple as that.
Did they have the right to be offended?
I must admit enjoying the idiots torpedoing themselves.
Some experts, dunderheids more like.
“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
H.M.G deserve more respect. Not all of them claim to be experts.
Being an expert is like being cool, hard or intelligent.
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
No, it’s not Britain, as I understand it
in the end a country is its culture and civilization and language and shared collective memory, what it feels itself to be
Mountains and landscapes and rivers and mighty forests are all great, but they do not make a nation. A nation is its people, and for them to prosper, or even exist, some crucial things must be shared
A Britain that is, say, 25% Muslim and 25% Hindu and 25% “other” and the white British - self identified - as the remaining quarter, is not the Britain I know and love. It might be great (I doubt it) it might be a disaster, it doesn’t even matter, it would not be the Britain I grew up in, nothing like it, and I find that deeply sad. And that is where we are heading on these numbers
That’s what I feel. Personally. And yet for some reason saying this is virtually a cancellable offence whereas for any other nation in earth it would be obvious common sense. Would the Saudis allow themselves to become a religious/ethnic minority in their own country? The Afghans? The Poles? The Russians? Anyone??
The first country you reach for is Saudi, where about 40% of the population are non-citizens. In Qatar it's around 90%.
If British should mean white, then non-white people shouldn't be considered British. A statement implies its contrapositive. There's also the assumption that it's okay to classify every person as either white or non-white.
Your position seems to be straight out of chapter 3 of volume 2 of Mein Kampf.
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
There's no need to bridle or issue warnings. That chapter in Mein Kampf advocates a setup where the population is divided into citizens (ethnic Germans), subjects (people of other ethnicities who are allowed to live in Germany but who aren't what Germany is all about), and foreigners (citizens of foreign states).
I'm not saying you are "equivalent" to Hitler. I'm saying that your position regarding what makes a nation and what a country's citizenship policy should be is the same as what Hitler advocates in that chapter of Mein Kampf. It is. Am I being unfair?
If that were already considered by almost everyone to be "the natural way of things" and "how things have always been", there'd have been no need for Hitler to advocate it.
The chapter is about 1000 words long. What do you disagree with in it?
Hitler considered that Germans of Jewish, Polish, Sorbish, Wendish, and gypsy origin were untermenschen despite being indistinguishable from “Aryans.”
Those who are encouraging the racists in order to get at one race (usually, but not always, Muslims) should realise that the racists they are emboldening will, if given power, not stop at that one race.
Why do you conflate race and Islam?
Are you saying Islamophobia's okay because you don't see it as 'racist' ?
You can always guarantee the islamaphobia card will be pulled out. Why is it a phobia not to like the pathetic ethics and mental rules of a religion that imprisons women , men can do as they wish biut women are for hiding in the house etc.
Don't talk the Free Kirk down. Women are allowed out, just not on a Sunday.
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
No, it’s not Britain, as I understand it
in the end a country is its culture and civilization and language and shared collective memory, what it feels itself to be
Mountains and landscapes and rivers and mighty forests are all great, but they do not make a nation. A nation is its people, and for them to prosper, or even exist, some crucial things must be shared
A Britain that is, say, 25% Muslim and 25% Hindu and 25% “other” and the white British - self identified - as the remaining quarter, is not the Britain I know and love. It might be great (I doubt it) it might be a disaster, it doesn’t even matter, it would not be the Britain I grew up in, nothing like it, and I find that deeply sad. And that is where we are heading on these numbers
That’s what I feel. Personally. And yet for some reason saying this is virtually a cancellable offence whereas for any other nation in earth it would be obvious common sense. Would the Saudis allow themselves to become a religious/ethnic minority in their own country? The Afghans? The Poles? The Russians? Anyone??
The first country you reach for is Saudi, where about 40% of the population are non-citizens. In Qatar it's around 90%.
If British should mean white, then non-white people shouldn't be considered British. A statement implies its contrapositive. There's also the assumption that it's okay to classify every person as either white or non-white.
Your position seems to be straight out of chapter 3 of volume 2 of Mein Kampf.
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
There's no need to bridle or issue warnings. That chapter in Mein Kampf advocates a setup where the population is divided into citizens (ethnic Germans), subjects (people of other ethnicities who are allowed to live in Germany but who aren't what Germany is all about), and foreigners (citizens of foreign states).
I'm not saying you are "equivalent" to Hitler. I'm saying that your position regarding what makes a nation and what a country's citizenship policy should be is the same as what Hitler advocates in that chapter of Mein Kampf. It is. Am I being unfair?
If that were already considered by almost everyone to be "the natural way of things" and "how things have always been", there'd have been no need for Hitler to advocate it.
The chapter is about 1000 words long. What do you disagree with in it?
Hitler considered that Germans of Jewish, Polish, Sorbish, Wendish, and gypsy origin were untermenschen despite being indistinguishable from “Aryans.”
Those who are encouraging the racists in order to get at one race (usually, but not always, Muslims) should realise that the racists they are emboldening will, if given power, not stop at that one race.
Why do you conflate race and Islam?
Are you saying Islamophobia's okay because you don't see it as 'racist' ?
You can always guarantee the islamaphobia card will be pulled out. Why is it a phobia not to like the pathetic ethics and mental rules of a religion that imprisons women , men can do as they wish biut women are for hiding in the house etc.
Don't talk the Free Kirk down. Women are allowed out, just not on a Sunday.
Women allowed out?!! When did the Free embrace that kind of Papism?
SNP forecast to be down 9 MSPs on 2021 Holyrood election on that poll too, Tories down 13 seats and Labour down 4 with the biggest gainers, as in England and Wales projected to be Reform who would gain 15 MSPs.
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.
It's different to 2016-19 I think, despite all the guff about the 'political class refusing to implement the vote'. Brexiteers (longstanding and newly converted by the result) had the votes in parliament to leave 2016-19 - they just couldn't find an exit deal they all wanted to vote for. A problem that was created by the referendum itself.
Politicians were in many ways responding to the demands of their voters rather than ignoring them. MPs whose voters were largely Remain-leaning were never going to vote for the most radical Brexit deals because it would've a betrayal of them. A PM was never going to no deal and tank the economy. Brexiteers who thought their voters were motivated by ending immigration or leaving the CU refused to vote for a deal that they didn't believe achieved those things, because they saw that as a betrayal.
The problem coming because a) Leaving the EU was a difficult thing to do - it was unwinding 40 years of relations and assumptions and b) The referendum, even in its 'out' result gave no clear mandate or roadmap to how that should be achieved or what it should entail. Brexit advocates who said we wouldn't have to leave the CU or SM suddenly became insistent that these were absolutely essential - again because they realised that this is what motivated their support.
Ultimately it needed an election with two clear propositions (flawed as they were) of how to implement or revisit the vote on the table (2017 all parties were still indulging in wishful thinking), which is what we got in the end. For all the sound and fury, the political process worked through the problem and reached an outcome.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
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
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
No, it’s not Britain, as I understand it
in the end a country is its culture and civilization and language and shared collective memory, what it feels itself to be
Mountains and landscapes and rivers and mighty forests are all great, but they do not make a nation. A nation is its people, and for them to prosper, or even exist, some crucial things must be shared
A Britain that is, say, 25% Muslim and 25% Hindu and 25% “other” and the white British - self identified - as the remaining quarter, is not the Britain I know and love. It might be great (I doubt it) it might be a disaster, it doesn’t even matter, it would not be the Britain I grew up in, nothing like it, and I find that deeply sad. And that is where we are heading on these numbers
That’s what I feel. Personally. And yet for some reason saying this is virtually a cancellable offence whereas for any other nation in earth it would be obvious common sense. Would the Saudis allow themselves to become a religious/ethnic minority in their own country? The Afghans? The Poles? The Russians? Anyone??
The first country you reach for is Saudi, where about 40% of the population are non-citizens. In Qatar it's around 90%.
If British should mean white, then non-white people shouldn't be considered British. A statement implies its contrapositive. There's also the assumption that it's okay to classify every person as either white or non-white.
Your position seems to be straight out of chapter 3 of volume 2 of Mein Kampf.
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
There's no need to bridle or issue warnings. That chapter in Mein Kampf advocates a setup where the population is divided into citizens (ethnic Germans), subjects (people of other ethnicities who are allowed to live in Germany but who aren't what Germany is all about), and foreigners (citizens of foreign states).
I'm not saying you are "equivalent" to Hitler. I'm saying that your position regarding what makes a nation and what a country's citizenship policy should be is the same as what Hitler advocates in that chapter of Mein Kampf. It is. Am I being unfair?
If that were already considered by almost everyone to be "the natural way of things" and "how things have always been", there'd have been no need for Hitler to advocate it.
The chapter is about 1000 words long. What do you disagree with in it?
Hitler considered that Germans of Jewish, Polish, Sorbish, Wendish, and gypsy origin were untermenschen despite being indistinguishable from “Aryans.”
Those who are encouraging the racists in order to get at one race (usually, but not always, Muslims) should realise that the racists they are emboldening will, if given power, not stop at that one race.
Why do you conflate race and Islam?
Are you saying Islamophobia's okay because you don't see it as 'racist' ?
You can always guarantee the islamaphobia card will be pulled out. Why is it a phobia not to like the pathetic ethics and mental rules of a religion that imprisons women , men can do as they wish biut women are for hiding in the house etc.
Don't talk the Free Kirk down. Women are allowed out, just not on a Sunday.
Women allowed out?!! When did the Free embrace that kind of Papism?
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
No, it’s not Britain, as I understand it
in the end a country is its culture and civilization and language and shared collective memory, what it feels itself to be
Mountains and landscapes and rivers and mighty forests are all great, but they do not make a nation. A nation is its people, and for them to prosper, or even exist, some crucial things must be shared
A Britain that is, say, 25% Muslim and 25% Hindu and 25% “other” and the white British - self identified - as the remaining quarter, is not the Britain I know and love. It might be great (I doubt it) it might be a disaster, it doesn’t even matter, it would not be the Britain I grew up in, nothing like it, and I find that deeply sad. And that is where we are heading on these numbers
That’s what I feel. Personally. And yet for some reason saying this is virtually a cancellable offence whereas for any other nation in earth it would be obvious common sense. Would the Saudis allow themselves to become a religious/ethnic minority in their own country? The Afghans? The Poles? The Russians? Anyone??
The first country you reach for is Saudi, where about 40% of the population are non-citizens. In Qatar it's around 90%.
If British should mean white, then non-white people shouldn't be considered British. A statement implies its contrapositive. There's also the assumption that it's okay to classify every person as either white or non-white.
Your position seems to be straight out of chapter 3 of volume 2 of Mein Kampf.
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
There's no need to bridle or issue warnings. That chapter in Mein Kampf advocates a setup where the population is divided into citizens (ethnic Germans), subjects (people of other ethnicities who are allowed to live in Germany but who aren't what Germany is all about), and foreigners (citizens of foreign states).
I'm not saying you are "equivalent" to Hitler. I'm saying that your position regarding what makes a nation and what a country's citizenship policy should be is the same as what Hitler advocates in that chapter of Mein Kampf. It is. Am I being unfair?
If that were already considered by almost everyone to be "the natural way of things" and "how things have always been", there'd have been no need for Hitler to advocate it.
The chapter is about 1000 words long. What do you disagree with in it?
Hitler considered that Germans of Jewish, Polish, Sorbish, Wendish, and gypsy origin were untermenschen despite being indistinguishable from “Aryans.”
Those who are encouraging the racists in order to get at one race (usually, but not always, Muslims) should realise that the racists they are emboldening will, if given power, not stop at that one race.
Why do you conflate race and Islam?
Are you saying Islamophobia's okay because you don't see it as 'racist' ?
You can always guarantee the islamaphobia card will be pulled out. Why is it a phobia not to like the pathetic ethics and mental rules of a religion that imprisons women , men can do as they wish biut women are for hiding in the house etc.
Don't talk the Free Kirk down. Women are allowed out, just not on a Sunday.
Women allowed out?!! When did the Free embrace that kind of Papism?
They all had to attend a compulsory 7,000 hour-long HR course and lost the will.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
Niel Fucking Farage and his fellow travelers won the Brexit vote by motivating people to blame others for their misfortune.
They are still trying to ride that wave.
The National Front appeared on Question Time once and were laughed off the air.
Somewhat under-reported. I’m moderately well read, but hadn’t heard of this.
How to torch 220 billion euros https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/how-to-incinerate-220-billion-euros In the depths of the COVID pandemic, with the ECB committed to keeping sovereign spreads low and the EU fiscal rules suspended, Italy launched what would become one of the costliest fiscal experiments in history. Prime Minister Conte announced that the government would subsidize 110% of the cost of housing renovations. The “SuperBonus,” as the policy was called, would improve energy efficiency and stimulate an economy that had barely grown in over two decades. Consumers would face neither economic nor liquidity constraints:
In the construction sector we will introduce a Superbonus for the home: everyone will be able to renovate their homes to make them greener. You will not spend a penny for these renovations. (Giuseppe Conte, May 13, 2020).
The state would pay homeowners 110% of the cost of renovating their properties through an innovative financial mechanism: rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.
The SuperBonus created the conditions for what Draghi's Minister of Economy Daniele Franco called “one of the largest frauds in the history of the Republic ” (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). Contractors often inflated renovation costs; for instance, a €50,000 project might be reported as €100,000. The bank would purchase the €110,000 tax credit at near face value, enabling the contractor to pocket the difference, sometimes sharing it with the homeowner. At times, no work at all was carried out, in which case, invoices for non-existent work on fake buildings were a perfect tool for organized financial crime. Fraudulent credits could then be resold multiple times in an unregulated market of state-backed tax discounts. In 2023, authorities estimated that such fraudulent activities had cost taxpayers €15 billion.
By 2024, it was clear that the lunch was, of course, anything but free. Builders were going around offering to pay people money to renovate their houses. A scheme initially budgeted at €35 billion will end up costing Italian taxpayers €220 billion…
Italian debt is 134% of GDP and I strongly suspect that does not include this nonsense. The ECB are so scared of default by a MS after the Greece fiasco they are turning a blind eye to everything. Sooner or later the Euro is going to pay a price for this.
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.
It's different to 2016-19 I think, despite all the guff about the 'political class refusing to implement the vote'. Brexiteers (longstanding and newly converted by the result) had the votes in parliament to leave 2016-19 - they just couldn't find an exit deal they all wanted to vote for. A problem that was created by the referendum itself.
Politicians were in many ways responding to the demands of their voters rather than ignoring them. MPs whose voters were largely Remain-leaning were never going to vote for the most radical Brexit deals because it would've a betrayal of them. A PM was never going to no deal and tank the economy. Brexiteers who thought their voters were motivated by ending immigration or leaving the CU refused to vote for a deal that they didn't believe achieved those things, because they saw that as a betrayal.
The problem coming because a) Leaving the EU was a difficult thing to do - it was unwinding 40 years of relations and assumptions and b) The referendum, even in its 'out' result gave no clear mandate or roadmap to how that should be achieved or what it should entail. Brexit advocates who said we wouldn't have to leave the CU or SM suddenly became insistent that these were absolutely essential - again because they realised that this is what motivated their support.
Ultimately it needed an election with two clear propositions (flawed as they were) of how to implement or revisit the vote on the table (2017 all parties were still indulging in wishful thinking), which is what we got in the end. For all the sound and fury, the political process worked through the problem and reached an outcome.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
Was it really a good idea to have people locked away for months on end with nothing to do but get into conspiracies on social media.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
Niel Fucking Farage and his fellow travelers won the Brexit vote by motivating people to blame others for their misfortune.
They are still trying to ride that wave.
The National Front appeared on Question Time once and were laughed off the air.
If only we had done that to the Brexiteers
Yes if only Nigel Farage had appeared on Question Time…
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.
That might be the perception.
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
If you believe civil war is going to break out in Britain in the next 5 years you are probably an Islamophobe.
The theoretical underpinning of the argument is that the state is losing legitimacy in the eyes of the majority population group whose position in society is being downgraded, so that doesn’t follow.
What, did Starmer rig the last election then? If people want the current government gone and replaced by a Trumpian one they have the opportunity to do so in four years. Nobody wants a f**ing civil war.
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.
That might be the perception.
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
Talk of revolution seems to be coming exclusively from middle-class elements of the British Right who still haven't got over the fact that Brexit and Liz Truss didn't solve all their problems.
If you believe civil war is going to break out in Britain in the next 5 years you are probably an Islamophobe.
I think that the major parties will not depart from their trajectory. They’ve found a hill to die upon.
This won’t lead to civil war. It will mean that Reform type people will enter power, to some degree.
Which will make things worse.
Just to make things clear, I am certainly not predicting civil war. I am predicting hard/far right governments in several European countries, enacting very harsh policies which will trigger *some* civil strife
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
I said nothing about hammering the rich. That's part of the problem, these days if you try to tax the rich too much they simply go somewhere else or hire consultants to ensure they don't pay that tax.
There's nothing wrong with being wealthy. There's nothing wrong with being uber rich, either. But increasingly that's coming at the expense of people lower down the pole - the statistics are pretty clear that money is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.
Frankly I have no idea how to fix any of the problems I outlined.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
Niel Fucking Farage and his fellow travelers won the Brexit vote by motivating people to blame others for their misfortune.
They are still trying to ride that wave.
The National Front appeared on Question Time once and were laughed off the air.
If only we had done that to the Brexiteers
I actually think Farage is the least of our worries to be honest. For all his faults - and they are many - he's generally been within the traditional strand of xenophobic British politics. Which has always been there, always will be. I don't like it, you don't like it, but it reflects some of public opinion and fits within the past norms of British politics. Hence why he's keen to draw red lines against the likes ofa conspiracist outright racist grifter like 'Tommy' Robinson.
The worry is that some of those who see Farage and Reform as their meal ticket to the big time believe far nastier, madder and more dangerous things than Farage does.
If you drew a venn diagram with people predicting a civil war and those who think SYL is a misunderstood, British patriot the two sets will largely overlap.
If you believe civil war is going to break out in Britain in the next 5 years you are probably an Islamophobe.
The theoretical underpinning of the argument is that the state is losing legitimacy in the eyes of the majority population group whose position in society is being downgraded, so that doesn’t follow.
What, did Starmer rig the last election then? If people want the current government gone and replaced by a Trumpian one they have the opportunity to do so in four years. Nobody wants a f**ing civil war.
They don’t want a civil war.
They want answers. They want something done. They wanted the garbage collected, the pot holes filled. They’d like a doctor with appointments and even a dentist.
For many decades, the politicians have bleated about The Will of The People being paramount.
So the people voted Starmer & Co. in to change things.
If they don’t do the job, NEXT!!!
I suppose this is frightening to career politicians who believe their parties own votes the way medieval lords owned peasants.
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.
That might be the perception.
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
Few in Britain compare their housing costs with people's in other countries. (Or how university entrance works, etc. etc.) They do compare their situation with what their parents' was at their age, and many find they're paying rent whereas their parents might have been in hock up to their eyeballs to moneylenders but they were gradually working their way towards owning all the equity in a house, rather than just burning money to have shelter every month. Many young people think they'll never own a house. That wasn't so in 1975. There's a massive difference between having to have a landlord in your life and being free of that kind of relationship, secure that you'll never again be in it.
Totally agree with your last 1.5 sentences though.
Somewhat under-reported. I’m moderately well read, but hadn’t heard of this.
How to torch 220 billion euros https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/how-to-incinerate-220-billion-euros In the depths of the COVID pandemic, with the ECB committed to keeping sovereign spreads low and the EU fiscal rules suspended, Italy launched what would become one of the costliest fiscal experiments in history. Prime Minister Conte announced that the government would subsidize 110% of the cost of housing renovations. The “SuperBonus,” as the policy was called, would improve energy efficiency and stimulate an economy that had barely grown in over two decades. Consumers would face neither economic nor liquidity constraints:
In the construction sector we will introduce a Superbonus for the home: everyone will be able to renovate their homes to make them greener. You will not spend a penny for these renovations. (Giuseppe Conte, May 13, 2020).
The state would pay homeowners 110% of the cost of renovating their properties through an innovative financial mechanism: rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.
The SuperBonus created the conditions for what Draghi's Minister of Economy Daniele Franco called “one of the largest frauds in the history of the Republic ” (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). Contractors often inflated renovation costs; for instance, a €50,000 project might be reported as €100,000. The bank would purchase the €110,000 tax credit at near face value, enabling the contractor to pocket the difference, sometimes sharing it with the homeowner. At times, no work at all was carried out, in which case, invoices for non-existent work on fake buildings were a perfect tool for organized financial crime. Fraudulent credits could then be resold multiple times in an unregulated market of state-backed tax discounts. In 2023, authorities estimated that such fraudulent activities had cost taxpayers €15 billion.
By 2024, it was clear that the lunch was, of course, anything but free. Builders were going around offering to pay people money to renovate their houses. A scheme initially budgeted at €35 billion will end up costing Italian taxpayers €220 billion…
Italian debt is 134% of GDP and I strongly suspect that does not include this nonsense. The ECB are so scared of default by a MS after the Greece fiasco they are turning a blind eye to everything. Sooner or later the Euro is going to pay a price for this.
And yet the scheme does substantially survive, though nowhere near 110% and I'm not sure how paid now.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
Niel Fucking Farage and his fellow travelers won the Brexit vote by motivating people to blame others for their misfortune.
They are still trying to ride that wave.
The National Front appeared on Question Time once and were laughed off the air.
If only we had done that to the Brexiteers
If only you'd taken the piss out of the side of a bus, eh?
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
Renting and private sector renting in particular has risen, and the birthrate has fallen. I tend to think @Poodle is right to suggest the first change has been a sizeable factor in the second. Has there been any research into this? What are the academically-promulgated explanations for the fall in the birthrate?
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.
That might be the perception.
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
Few in Britain compare their housing costs with people's in other countries. They do compare their situation with what their parents' was at their age, and many find they're paying rent whereas their parents might have been in hock up to their eyeballs to moneylenders but they were gradually working their way towards owning all the equity in a house, rather than just burning money to have shelter every month. Many young people think they'll never own a house. There's a massive difference between having to have a landlord in your life and being free of that kind of relationship, secure that you'll never again be in it.
Totally agree with your last 1.5 sentences though.
That's absolutely true, and I agree entirely with you sentiments. But it simply does not impact enough people. The bank of mum and dad is generous and my family has entrenched that intergenerational inequality like so many others.
The number of people renting has certainly crept up - but so has the number of people owning outright. There is no incentive for most people, including even me, to risk upsetting the applecart.
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
Renting and private sector renting in particular has risen, and the birthrate has fallen. I tend to think @Poodle is right to suggest the first change has been a sizeable factor in the second. Has there been any research into this? What are the academically-promulgated explanations for the fall in the birthrate?
Last time I checked, women wanting more out of life than kids was the biggest and likely insurmountable reason.
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.
There though you have the problem that rich old people have the sort of assets held by most mp's and senior public sector workers and mp's have twigged we might get a little tetchy if its tax these assets unless you are a member of parliament or in the public sector
Somewhat under-reported. I’m moderately well read, but hadn’t heard of this.
How to torch 220 billion euros https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/how-to-incinerate-220-billion-euros In the depths of the COVID pandemic, with the ECB committed to keeping sovereign spreads low and the EU fiscal rules suspended, Italy launched what would become one of the costliest fiscal experiments in history. Prime Minister Conte announced that the government would subsidize 110% of the cost of housing renovations. The “SuperBonus,” as the policy was called, would improve energy efficiency and stimulate an economy that had barely grown in over two decades. Consumers would face neither economic nor liquidity constraints:
In the construction sector we will introduce a Superbonus for the home: everyone will be able to renovate their homes to make them greener. You will not spend a penny for these renovations. (Giuseppe Conte, May 13, 2020).
The state would pay homeowners 110% of the cost of renovating their properties through an innovative financial mechanism: rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.
The SuperBonus created the conditions for what Draghi's Minister of Economy Daniele Franco called “one of the largest frauds in the history of the Republic ” (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). Contractors often inflated renovation costs; for instance, a €50,000 project might be reported as €100,000. The bank would purchase the €110,000 tax credit at near face value, enabling the contractor to pocket the difference, sometimes sharing it with the homeowner. At times, no work at all was carried out, in which case, invoices for non-existent work on fake buildings were a perfect tool for organized financial crime. Fraudulent credits could then be resold multiple times in an unregulated market of state-backed tax discounts. In 2023, authorities estimated that such fraudulent activities had cost taxpayers €15 billion.
By 2024, it was clear that the lunch was, of course, anything but free. Builders were going around offering to pay people money to renovate their houses. A scheme initially budgeted at €35 billion will end up costing Italian taxpayers €220 billion…
It's almost the opposite of the UK where we underinvested and now need to spend 10x.
It’s worse than that.
It’s a systemic problem with the European fiscal/monetary mechanisms.
… But the Superbonus illustrates a deeper problem facing Europe: the traditional mechanisms for fiscal discipline have broken down. Market forces (the bond buyers) have been neutralized by ECB intervention. The European Commission's fiscal rules, already weakened by repeated violations from large countries like France and Germany, are being replaced by new rules that, since they rely on bilateral bargaining, provide little real constraint. And domestic political systems, freed from market pressure, increasingly treat debt-financed spending as a free lunch.
This erosion of discipline isn't limited to Italy. France's deficit has drifted to 6.1% of GDP. Spain reversed its post crisis pension reform right around the time Italy was passing the Superbonus, with much larger negative consequences for fiscal sustainability. In a world where the ECB will always intervene to prevent bond market pressure and Brussels cannot credibly enforce fiscal rules on large states, sustainable fiscal policy becomes politically almost impossible.
The very mechanisms designed to protect the euro may now be undermining it. When the ECB steps in to prevent market pressure on sovereign bonds, it removes a crucial disciplining force on national fiscal policies, creating perverse incentives for politicians to expand spending without regard for long-term sustainability. A currency union without fiscal union can only work if member states maintain sustainable spending policies. But Europe now finds itself caught in a trap of its own making: its crisis-fighting tools are steadily eroding the discipline necessary for the euro's survival…
If you believe civil war is going to break out in Britain in the next 5 years you are probably an Islamophobe.
Don't be daft. Civil war doesn't necessarily mean its every v muslims.....frankly I suspect if a civil war breaks out much more likely to be the have nots vs the idiots in parliament
So does nobody think that the Labour Party definition of Islamophobia is fit for law?
I asked the question over an hour ago and there's been no response
Maybe provide a link to A) the definition you're talking about the law your talking about
Find your own links
It's the official Labour Party definition, adopted from the All Party Parliamentary Group headed up by Streeting
Angela Rayner has been put in charge of defining Islamophobia
Under Labour law, any insinuation that rape gangs might have a rather high Muslim element is Islamophobia
Huh? You ask a vague question, complain that nobody has answered. I ask for clarification and you still don't want to provide any links to what you are talking about. I don't even know what you mean by "Labour law".
I think its increasingly likely that the next tank will not have a human crew. Humans are just too slow and vulnerable to survive on the modern battlefield. I very much hope we are learning a lot from the incredible speed of development of drones in Ukraine.
The usual cycle. May locals look brutal for the Tories.
Not only are they doing over 2/3 of the ward defences, but they are defending their high water mark and Labour's low showing of 2021. Recent by-elections suggests the Tories are around 12 points down on 2021, and Labour only 8-9 points down.
The Tories are likely to lose substantial seats to the LDs, to Reform and even possibly some to Labour.
(Note, that current local by-elections are almost totally re-runs of 2022-24, with Labour defending a higher base and the Tories lower - meaning Labour 15 points down, Tories only 4 down).
I thought "sod it" and went to see "Captain America: Brave New World". It...wasn't bad. It proceeded logically, if a bit bitty, and perhaps it may have had one too many endings, but...yeah, it was OK. The CGI was more spectacular than realistic, which I like but most don't, and it left out ONE OBVIOUS MUSICAL CUE, but apart from that it was OK. Nowhere near as good as CW:TWS, but about as good as CW:TFA and better than, say, Thor:TDW. About "Black Widow" level if a bit more and I enjoyed it.
I think its increasingly likely that the next tank will not have a human crew. Humans are just too slow and vulnerable to survive on the modern battlefield. I very much hope we are learning a lot from the incredible speed of development of drones in Ukraine.
Somewhat under-reported. I’m moderately well read, but hadn’t heard of this.
How to torch 220 billion euros https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/how-to-incinerate-220-billion-euros In the depths of the COVID pandemic, with the ECB committed to keeping sovereign spreads low and the EU fiscal rules suspended, Italy launched what would become one of the costliest fiscal experiments in history. Prime Minister Conte announced that the government would subsidize 110% of the cost of housing renovations. The “SuperBonus,” as the policy was called, would improve energy efficiency and stimulate an economy that had barely grown in over two decades. Consumers would face neither economic nor liquidity constraints:
In the construction sector we will introduce a Superbonus for the home: everyone will be able to renovate their homes to make them greener. You will not spend a penny for these renovations. (Giuseppe Conte, May 13, 2020).
The state would pay homeowners 110% of the cost of renovating their properties through an innovative financial mechanism: rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.
The SuperBonus created the conditions for what Draghi's Minister of Economy Daniele Franco called “one of the largest frauds in the history of the Republic ” (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). Contractors often inflated renovation costs; for instance, a €50,000 project might be reported as €100,000. The bank would purchase the €110,000 tax credit at near face value, enabling the contractor to pocket the difference, sometimes sharing it with the homeowner. At times, no work at all was carried out, in which case, invoices for non-existent work on fake buildings were a perfect tool for organized financial crime. Fraudulent credits could then be resold multiple times in an unregulated market of state-backed tax discounts. In 2023, authorities estimated that such fraudulent activities had cost taxpayers €15 billion.
By 2024, it was clear that the lunch was, of course, anything but free. Builders were going around offering to pay people money to renovate their houses. A scheme initially budgeted at €35 billion will end up costing Italian taxpayers €220 billion…
It's almost the opposite of the UK where we underinvested and now need to spend 10x.
It’s worse than that.
It’s a systemic problem with the European fiscal/monetary mechanisms.
… But the Superbonus illustrates a deeper problem facing Europe: the traditional mechanisms for fiscal discipline have broken down. Market forces (the bond buyers) have been neutralized by ECB intervention. The European Commission's fiscal rules, already weakened by repeated violations from large countries like France and Germany, are being replaced by new rules that, since they rely on bilateral bargaining, provide little real constraint. And domestic political systems, freed from market pressure, increasingly treat debt-financed spending as a free lunch.
This erosion of discipline isn't limited to Italy. France's deficit has drifted to 6.1% of GDP. Spain reversed its post crisis pension reform right around the time Italy was passing the Superbonus, with much larger negative consequences for fiscal sustainability. In a world where the ECB will always intervene to prevent bond market pressure and Brussels cannot credibly enforce fiscal rules on large states, sustainable fiscal policy becomes politically almost impossible.
The very mechanisms designed to protect the euro may now be undermining it. When the ECB steps in to prevent market pressure on sovereign bonds, it removes a crucial disciplining force on national fiscal policies, creating perverse incentives for politicians to expand spending without regard for long-term sustainability. A currency union without fiscal union can only work if member states maintain sustainable spending policies. But Europe now finds itself caught in a trap of its own making: its crisis-fighting tools are steadily eroding the discipline necessary for the euro's survival…
One of the main Brexit arguments that’s largely been forgotten now is that it will be better to be free of Brussels when the next Eurozone crisis hits.
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.
That might be the perception.
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
You're being utterly naïve if you believe what you write.
Yes a large proportion own outright, but that's a large proportion who bought decades ago when it was affordable.
For young people, it is a much smaller proportion and the situation has been trending worse.
Fuel and other things have been getting better, yes, which is a good thing to be welcomed; but housing is the massive exception to the trend of everything else, utterly dwarfing it if you don't own your own home and leaving a massive divide of the haves and have-nots, not based on income, but based on do you need to pay current market rates for a roof over your head - or not?
Of course many make a racket out of the current system, living off rents paid by their tenants rather than paying rent themselves.
They want answers. They want something done. They wanted the garbage collected, the pot holes filled. They’d like a doctor with appointments and even a dentist.
Spot on. The tories showed no signs of being able to fix those problems, so people voted Labour.
Labour show no sign of being able to fix them either, so Reform are shooting up in the polls despite being a bunch of dodgy weirdos lead by someone much of the country knows is a waste of space.
We are cursed with politicians who seem to be terrified of trying to solve problems. Labour will dither and spin for five years, then get kicked out.
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
“A group of European countries has been quietly working on a plan to send troops into Ukraine to help enforce any future peace settlement with Russia. Britain and France are at the forefront of the effort, though details remain scarce.”
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
One only has to look around the genuinely poor countries of the world to realize that the bottom 50% (who have clean water, education, electricity, iphones, healthcare, and food on the table) certainly do have things to lose.
I'm not saying that the bottom 50% have not been mistreated, but it is delusional to think that things could not be an awful lot worse for them.
The White House @WhiteHouse President Trump is making history!🇺🇸
🏈POTUS attends Super Bowl 🇺🇸Gulf of America 🚫No more paper straws 🤝11 hostages freed in 4 weeks ⚙️Steel/aluminum tariffs 💪Make America Healthy Again Commission ⛽National Energy Dominance Council
“A group of European countries has been quietly working on a plan to send troops into Ukraine to help enforce any future peace settlement with Russia. Britain and France are at the forefront of the effort, though details remain scarce.”
Somewhat under-reported. I’m moderately well read, but hadn’t heard of this.
How to torch 220 billion euros https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/how-to-incinerate-220-billion-euros In the depths of the COVID pandemic, with the ECB committed to keeping sovereign spreads low and the EU fiscal rules suspended, Italy launched what would become one of the costliest fiscal experiments in history. Prime Minister Conte announced that the government would subsidize 110% of the cost of housing renovations. The “SuperBonus,” as the policy was called, would improve energy efficiency and stimulate an economy that had barely grown in over two decades. Consumers would face neither economic nor liquidity constraints:
In the construction sector we will introduce a Superbonus for the home: everyone will be able to renovate their homes to make them greener. You will not spend a penny for these renovations. (Giuseppe Conte, May 13, 2020).
The state would pay homeowners 110% of the cost of renovating their properties through an innovative financial mechanism: rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.
The SuperBonus created the conditions for what Draghi's Minister of Economy Daniele Franco called “one of the largest frauds in the history of the Republic ” (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). Contractors often inflated renovation costs; for instance, a €50,000 project might be reported as €100,000. The bank would purchase the €110,000 tax credit at near face value, enabling the contractor to pocket the difference, sometimes sharing it with the homeowner. At times, no work at all was carried out, in which case, invoices for non-existent work on fake buildings were a perfect tool for organized financial crime. Fraudulent credits could then be resold multiple times in an unregulated market of state-backed tax discounts. In 2023, authorities estimated that such fraudulent activities had cost taxpayers €15 billion.
By 2024, it was clear that the lunch was, of course, anything but free. Builders were going around offering to pay people money to renovate their houses. A scheme initially budgeted at €35 billion will end up costing Italian taxpayers €220 billion…
It's almost the opposite of the UK where we underinvested and now need to spend 10x.
It’s worse than that.
It’s a systemic problem with the European fiscal/monetary mechanisms.
… But the Superbonus illustrates a deeper problem facing Europe: the traditional mechanisms for fiscal discipline have broken down. Market forces (the bond buyers) have been neutralized by ECB intervention. The European Commission's fiscal rules, already weakened by repeated violations from large countries like France and Germany, are being replaced by new rules that, since they rely on bilateral bargaining, provide little real constraint. And domestic political systems, freed from market pressure, increasingly treat debt-financed spending as a free lunch.
This erosion of discipline isn't limited to Italy. France's deficit has drifted to 6.1% of GDP. Spain reversed its post crisis pension reform right around the time Italy was passing the Superbonus, with much larger negative consequences for fiscal sustainability. In a world where the ECB will always intervene to prevent bond market pressure and Brussels cannot credibly enforce fiscal rules on large states, sustainable fiscal policy becomes politically almost impossible.
The very mechanisms designed to protect the euro may now be undermining it. When the ECB steps in to prevent market pressure on sovereign bonds, it removes a crucial disciplining force on national fiscal policies, creating perverse incentives for politicians to expand spending without regard for long-term sustainability. A currency union without fiscal union can only work if member states maintain sustainable spending policies. But Europe now finds itself caught in a trap of its own making: its crisis-fighting tools are steadily eroding the discipline necessary for the euro's survival…
That was basically what I was hinting at. The ECB has lost control of the finances of Euro members who have used a variety of means to subvert fiscal discipline to keep their economies growing. I think that a major Euro crisis is now inevitable. The ECB are surviving using the threat of interventions to penalise those seeking to short sovereign bonds but sooner or later their bluff will be called and all hell will break loose. It reminds me of the run up to Black Wednesday for the UK but on a much larger scale.
That and the ongoing property crisis in China are, IMV, the 2 largest threats to world stability at the moment and yet we spend all our time worrying about Trump.
I think its increasingly likely that the next tank will not have a human crew. Humans are just too slow and vulnerable to survive on the modern battlefield. I very much hope we are learning a lot from the incredible speed of development of drones in Ukraine.
Terrible though war is, it is the main generator of technical innovation.
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.
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?
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
Aside from the Goode Olde Days of The Rentman, with everyone hiding, to pretend they were out…
Modern housing in much of the UK consumes a huge portion of the wages of young working people. They are living to pay their mortgage or someone else’s.
This is spreading up the wealth column. With juniors in banks, in London, now have no prospect of owning more than a one bed flat in an okish location.
Generation Rent won’t be able to retire. Because they won’t have saved any money to pay the rent. Because it all went on the rent.
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.
What's new? A decent chunk of the population have always lived financially precarious or poverty stricken lives - I remember when we had four million unemployed - and we've not had a revolution yet.
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.
That might be the perception.
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
You're being utterly naïve if you believe what you write.
Yes a large proportion own outright, but that's a large proportion who bought decades ago when it was affordable.
For young people, it is a much smaller proportion and the situation has been trending worse.
Fuel and other things have been getting better, yes, which is a good thing to be welcomed; but housing is the massive exception to the trend of everything else, utterly dwarfing it if you don't own your own home and leaving a massive divide of the haves and have-nots, not based on income, but based on do you need to pay current market rates for a roof over your head - or not?
Of course many make a racket out of the current system, living off rents paid by their tenants rather than paying rent themselves.
You have an unhappy habit of confusing what I state as facts with what I believe should be the case.
I think its increasingly likely that the next tank will not have a human crew. Humans are just too slow and vulnerable to survive on the modern battlefield. I very much hope we are learning a lot from the incredible speed of development of drones in Ukraine.
Terrible though war is, it is the main generator of technical innovation.
Trouble is it is only a question of time before the bad guys realise they can use cheap drones for protests or domestic terrorism. Then we might wish we'd buried cables underground!
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.
If you think every candidate is shit, you also have the right to stand yourself. If 50% think all the other candidates are shit, you may well get elected.
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?
What massive technical innovation have Apple managed in the past 10 years? VR failed, Self Driving Car failed, the M chips are all based upon ARM, things like the much improved screen tech is Samsung. And not to say they are absolutely no where with LLM / generative AI (having to rely on API keys to OpenAI work).
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
One only has to look around the genuinely poor countries of the world to realize that the bottom 50% (who have clean water, education, electricity, iphones, healthcare, and food on the table) certainly do have things to lose.
I'm not saying that the bottom 50% have not been mistreated, but it is delusional to think that things could not be an awful lot worse for them.
But in western countries they take those things for granted and it would be a brave western government that said to the poorer people no taps there are puddles you can drink from. The bottom 50% here are getting angrier which is why I think reform might be the 2029 vote and reform will fail then what happens as I am pretty sure lib dem, tory, lab won't be the answer they will go for
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
Renting and private sector renting in particular has risen, and the birthrate has fallen. I tend to think @Poodle is right to suggest the first change has been a sizeable factor in the second. Has there been any research into this? What are the academically-promulgated explanations for the fall in the birthrate?
I think that plastic is the cause of the fall in the birthrate.
Many plastics use phthalates as softeners. Phthalates mimic oestrogen and have a feminising effect, more than halving sperm counts. PVC is the worst offender.
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
Aside from the Goode Olde Days of The Rentman, with everyone hiding, to pretend they were out…
Modern housing in much of the UK consumes a huge portion of the wages of young working people. They are living to pay their mortgage or someone else’s.
This is spreading up the wealth column. With juniors in banks, in London, now have no prospect of owning more than a one bed flat in an okish location.
Generation Rent won’t be able to retire. Because they won’t have saved any money to pay the rent. Because it all went on the rent.
Agreed about housing costs, whether mortgage or rent, taking a fair chunk from even dual-income households, but one odd thing is how many young, highly-paid professionals seem never to have heard of commuting and want to live within walking distance of the City or Canary Wharf, or at least within zones one or two.
bird flu will mutate to human-to-human transmission in America thanks to the indifference and RFK will block vaccination and Trump 2.0 will be imploded in the ensuing death and chaos.
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
bird flu will mutate to human-to-human transmission in America thanks to the indifference and RFK will block vaccination and Trump 2.0 will be imploded in the ensuing death and chaos.
There are a number of scenarios that in a sane World would see the end of the Trump experiment
-Mass outbreaks of preventable disease -Welfare checks (sic) being stopped by fratboys -Civil unrest
Perhaps we should run a sweepstake, although I am not sure any of them will in fact move the dial
bird flu will mutate to human-to-human transmission in America thanks to the indifference and RFK will block vaccination and Trump 2.0 will be imploded in the ensuing death and chaos.
What about AGI being achieved and we are all forced to comply with our AI overload.....
bird flu will mutate to human-to-human transmission in America thanks to the indifference and RFK will block vaccination and Trump 2.0 will be imploded in the ensuing death and chaos.
Lets hope not for all our sakes (would be a fitting way for Trump 2.0 to go down though)
White british births will likely be a minority by 2030. And apparently now Tommy Robinson is being mistreated in jail.
Unlikely given over 80% of the population is still white
Er, if you project the numbers then it is extremely likely that white British births will be the minority by 2030, if they are only 56% now. That’s just math
I checked the figures on the ONS website, for births where ethnicity is recorded. The number of white babies in 2022 was 412,000 out of 585,000, or 70.7%.
So maybe white BRITISH is the discrepancy? Or is the original claim bollocks?
A huge number of white people have European or Irish ancestry. Since 2000, the categories of ethnic groups have also expanded enormously.
There’s also a growing number of mixed-race children, too.
I just checked. I think the stat is legit. It is a catastrophe in the making, and very very sad
It’s one reason I travel so much, to be brutally honest. I can’t bear to see what is happening to my country. it’s like leaving a friend with some terminal cancer, better to have the memory of what was, than see what is
And before everyone has conniptions, I favour immigration. You need it to keep genetic variety and cultural dynamism. in moderation it is a really GOOD thing. But we are far beyond “moderation” now
I think you are being a little extreme. But I do understand where you are coming from.
Is Britain still Britain if it “White British” is no longer the majority? Or if Muslims were, say, 25% of the population?
Britain, thankfully, has never been a “blood and soil” type country, and the word British is also mercifully flexible. But nevertheless, there are surely limits beyond which many of the cultural assumptions one takes for granted simply dissolve, with commensurate implications for society and politics.
No, it’s not Britain, as I understand it
in the end a country is its culture and civilization and language and shared collective memory, what it feels itself to be
Mountains and landscapes and rivers and mighty forests are all great, but they do not make a nation. A nation is its people, and for them to prosper, or even exist, some crucial things must be shared
A Britain that is, say, 25% Muslim and 25% Hindu and 25% “other” and the white British - self identified - as the remaining quarter, is not the Britain I know and love. It might be great (I doubt it) it might be a disaster, it doesn’t even matter, it would not be the Britain I grew up in, nothing like it, and I find that deeply sad. And that is where we are heading on these numbers
That’s what I feel. Personally. And yet for some reason saying this is virtually a cancellable offence whereas for any other nation in earth it would be obvious common sense. Would the Saudis allow themselves to become a religious/ethnic minority in their own country? The Afghans? The Poles? The Russians? Anyone??
The first country you reach for is Saudi, where about 40% of the population are non-citizens. In Qatar it's around 90%.
If British should mean white, then non-white people shouldn't be considered British. A statement implies its contrapositive. There's also the assumption that it's okay to classify every person as either white or non-white.
Your position seems to be straight out of chapter 3 of volume 2 of Mein Kampf.
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
There's no need to bridle or issue warnings. That chapter in Mein Kampf advocates a setup where the population is divided into citizens (ethnic Germans), subjects (people of other ethnicities who are allowed to live in Germany but who aren't what Germany is all about), and foreigners (citizens of foreign states).
I'm not saying you are "equivalent" to Hitler. I'm saying that your position regarding what makes a nation and what a country's citizenship policy should be is the same as what Hitler advocates in that chapter of Mein Kampf. It is. Am I being unfair?
If that were already considered by almost everyone to be "the natural way of things" and "how things have always been", there'd have been no need for Hitler to advocate it.
The chapter is about 1000 words long. What do you disagree with in it?
Hitler considered that Germans of Jewish, Polish, Sorbish, Wendish, and gypsy origin were untermenschen despite being indistinguishable from “Aryans.”
Those who are encouraging the racists in order to get at one race (usually, but not always, Muslims) should realise that the racists they are emboldening will, if given power, not stop at that one race.
Why do you conflate race and Islam?
Are you saying Islamophobia's okay because you don't see it as 'racist' ?
You can always guarantee the islamaphobia card will be pulled out. Why is it a phobia not to like the pathetic ethics and mental rules of a religion that imprisons women , men can do as they wish biut women are for hiding in the house etc.
Don't talk the Free Kirk down. Women are allowed out, just not on a Sunday.
*Nobody* is allowed out, male, female, or whatever, at least in some Free Kirks, on Sunday [edit]..
Except, very explicitly, for works of necessity or mercy - e.g. emergency help, or looking after those unable to do it for themselves, which includes milking the cows.
bird flu will mutate to human-to-human transmission in America thanks to the indifference and RFK will block vaccination and Trump 2.0 will be imploded in the ensuing death and chaos.
Just think how apoplectic he will be when the rest of the world bans flights to and from the USA.
Somewhat under-reported. I’m moderately well read, but hadn’t heard of this.
How to torch 220 billion euros https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/how-to-incinerate-220-billion-euros In the depths of the COVID pandemic, with the ECB committed to keeping sovereign spreads low and the EU fiscal rules suspended, Italy launched what would become one of the costliest fiscal experiments in history. Prime Minister Conte announced that the government would subsidize 110% of the cost of housing renovations. The “SuperBonus,” as the policy was called, would improve energy efficiency and stimulate an economy that had barely grown in over two decades. Consumers would face neither economic nor liquidity constraints:
In the construction sector we will introduce a Superbonus for the home: everyone will be able to renovate their homes to make them greener. You will not spend a penny for these renovations. (Giuseppe Conte, May 13, 2020).
The state would pay homeowners 110% of the cost of renovating their properties through an innovative financial mechanism: rather than direct cash grants, the government issued tax credits that could be transferred. A homeowner could claim these credits directly against their taxes, have contractors claim them against invoices, or sell them to banks. These credits became a kind of fiscal currency – a parallel financial instrument that functioned as off-the-books debt (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). The setup purposefully created the illusion of a free lunch: it hid the cost to the government, as for European accounting purposes the credits would show up only as lost tax revenue rather than new spending.
The SuperBonus created the conditions for what Draghi's Minister of Economy Daniele Franco called “one of the largest frauds in the history of the Republic ” (Capone and Stagnaro, 2024). Contractors often inflated renovation costs; for instance, a €50,000 project might be reported as €100,000. The bank would purchase the €110,000 tax credit at near face value, enabling the contractor to pocket the difference, sometimes sharing it with the homeowner. At times, no work at all was carried out, in which case, invoices for non-existent work on fake buildings were a perfect tool for organized financial crime. Fraudulent credits could then be resold multiple times in an unregulated market of state-backed tax discounts. In 2023, authorities estimated that such fraudulent activities had cost taxpayers €15 billion.
By 2024, it was clear that the lunch was, of course, anything but free. Builders were going around offering to pay people money to renovate their houses. A scheme initially budgeted at €35 billion will end up costing Italian taxpayers €220 billion…
It's almost the opposite of the UK where we underinvested and now need to spend 10x.
It’s worse than that.
It’s a systemic problem with the European fiscal/monetary mechanisms.
… But the Superbonus illustrates a deeper problem facing Europe: the traditional mechanisms for fiscal discipline have broken down. Market forces (the bond buyers) have been neutralized by ECB intervention. The European Commission's fiscal rules, already weakened by repeated violations from large countries like France and Germany, are being replaced by new rules that, since they rely on bilateral bargaining, provide little real constraint. And domestic political systems, freed from market pressure, increasingly treat debt-financed spending as a free lunch.
This erosion of discipline isn't limited to Italy. France's deficit has drifted to 6.1% of GDP. Spain reversed its post crisis pension reform right around the time Italy was passing the Superbonus, with much larger negative consequences for fiscal sustainability. In a world where the ECB will always intervene to prevent bond market pressure and Brussels cannot credibly enforce fiscal rules on large states, sustainable fiscal policy becomes politically almost impossible.
The very mechanisms designed to protect the euro may now be undermining it. When the ECB steps in to prevent market pressure on sovereign bonds, it removes a crucial disciplining force on national fiscal policies, creating perverse incentives for politicians to expand spending without regard for long-term sustainability. A currency union without fiscal union can only work if member states maintain sustainable spending policies. But Europe now finds itself caught in a trap of its own making: its crisis-fighting tools are steadily eroding the discipline necessary for the euro's survival…
One of the main Brexit arguments that’s largely been forgotten now is that it will be better to be free of Brussels when the next Eurozone crisis hits.
I still support Brexit but anyone who thinks that a major monetary crisis in the EU would be a source of schadenfreude for us and not being in the EU would somehow make us immune to it is being dangerously naïve. It would trigger a severe recession here and, very likely, cause serious problems for our own sovereign debt. Yet another reason why a budget that increased our already high deficit was a major error.
Comments
Which will enslave Russia, this time. Just for the LOLs.
… Of the Palestinian prisoners released on Saturday, 333 had been captured or arrested in Gaza since the beginning of the war. They were taken straight to the territory. Thirty-six Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails were also released. ..
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.
Anyone who claims it out loud, isn’t.
https://x.com/marcuscarslaw1/status/1890855993753362487?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
I asked the question over an hour ago and there's been no response
LDs up 9 to 13 MSPs and Greens up 2 to 10
Politicians were in many ways responding to the demands of their voters rather than ignoring them. MPs whose voters were largely Remain-leaning were never going to vote for the most radical Brexit deals because it would've a betrayal of them. A PM was never going to no deal and tank the economy. Brexiteers who thought their voters were motivated by ending immigration or leaving the CU refused to vote for a deal that they didn't believe achieved those things, because they saw that as a betrayal.
The problem coming because a) Leaving the EU was a difficult thing to do - it was unwinding 40 years of relations and assumptions and b) The referendum, even in its 'out' result gave no clear mandate or roadmap to how that should be achieved or what it should entail. Brexit advocates who said we wouldn't have to leave the CU or SM suddenly became insistent that these were absolutely essential - again because they realised that this is what motivated their support.
Ultimately it needed an election with two clear propositions (flawed as they were) of how to implement or revisit the vote on the table (2017 all parties were still indulging in wishful thinking), which is what we got in the end. For all the sound and fury, the political process worked through the problem and reached an outcome.
The danger now is that post-pandemic an awful lot of people have become radicalised, notably but not exclusive to the conspiracist far right, with no real political process that's going to end in a tranche of people feeling completely alienated from fellow citizens they believe have become malignant.
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
A) the definition you're talking about
They are still trying to ride that wave.
The National Front appeared on Question Time once and were laughed off the air.
If only we had done that to the Brexiteers
But for most people hosting costs are a low proportion of their incomes, particularly compared with other countries. A large proportion own outright, and as an issue it barely registers in polling.
Crime continues to fall, with the exception of fraud and sexual assault. The costs of fuel and the purchase price of cars has fallen in real terms (offset somewhat by insurance).
Public sector pay had grown more slowly than the private sector, with large real terms cuts in health. A functional NHS is the second biggest priority for people after the economy.
There is widespread support for the switch to renewables, including among Reform voters, and an understanding that fossil fuels are the underlying reason for high energy prices.
The fact is there are not enough people in the kind of financial or social peril you describe, and those that are are generally highly unlikely to take to the streets. Instead, they post furiously on Facebook and occupy an online bubble.
If people want the current government gone and replaced by a Trumpian one they have the opportunity to do so in four years. Nobody wants a f**ing civil war.
There's nothing wrong with being wealthy. There's nothing wrong with being uber rich, either. But increasingly that's coming at the expense of people lower down the pole - the statistics are pretty clear that money is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.
Frankly I have no idea how to fix any of the problems I outlined.
The worry is that some of those who see Farage and Reform as their meal ticket to the big time believe far nastier, madder and more dangerous things than Farage does.
It's the official Labour Party definition, adopted from the All Party Parliamentary Group headed up by Streeting
Angela Rayner has been put in charge of defining Islamophobia
Under Labour law, any insinuation that rape gangs might have a rather high Muslim element is Islamophobia
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/33399607/kemi-badenoch-tory-leadership/
They have now had 20-odd cases reported in Texas this week. Mostly children.
They want answers. They want something done. They wanted the garbage collected, the pot holes filled. They’d like a doctor with appointments and even a dentist.
For many decades, the politicians have bleated about The Will of The People being paramount.
So the people voted Starmer & Co. in to change things.
If they don’t do the job, NEXT!!!
I suppose this is frightening to career politicians who believe their parties own votes the way medieval lords owned peasants.
Totally agree with your last 1.5 sentences though.
https://www.salonemilano.it/en/articoli/bonus-edilizi-2025#:~:text=The Superbonus is being phased,work, have now been terminated.
The ones that tried to set fire to a hotel they thought was housing immigrants for example.
Forgot that this place operates under Labour Party rules
The number of people renting has certainly crept up - but so has the number of people owning outright. There is no incentive for most people, including even me, to risk upsetting the applecart.
Most people just want stuff to work and a pay rise that’s ahead of inflation. Not fascism.
It’s a systemic problem with the European fiscal/monetary mechanisms.
… But the Superbonus illustrates a deeper problem facing Europe: the traditional mechanisms for fiscal discipline have broken down. Market forces (the bond buyers) have been neutralized by ECB intervention. The European Commission's fiscal rules, already weakened by repeated violations from large countries like France and Germany, are being replaced by new rules that, since they rely on bilateral bargaining, provide little real constraint. And domestic political systems, freed from market pressure, increasingly treat debt-financed spending as a free lunch.
This erosion of discipline isn't limited to Italy. France's deficit has drifted to 6.1% of GDP. Spain reversed its post crisis pension reform right around the time Italy was passing the Superbonus, with much larger negative consequences for fiscal sustainability. In a world where the ECB will always intervene to prevent bond market pressure and Brussels cannot credibly enforce fiscal rules on large states, sustainable fiscal policy becomes politically almost impossible.
The very mechanisms designed to protect the euro may now be undermining it. When the ECB steps in to prevent market pressure on sovereign bonds, it removes a crucial disciplining force on national fiscal policies, creating perverse incentives for politicians to expand spending without regard for long-term sustainability. A currency union without fiscal union can only work if member states maintain sustainable spending policies. But Europe now finds itself caught in a trap of its own making: its crisis-fighting tools are steadily eroding the discipline necessary for the euro's survival…
That's why nobody has answered your question.
Dale Vince
@DaleVince
·
9h
Reform don’t want a net-zero future apparently.
But two of their most senior people are investors in the industry…?
https://x.com/DaleVince/status/1890740117922361543
I think its increasingly likely that the next tank will not have a human crew. Humans are just too slow and vulnerable to survive on the modern battlefield. I very much hope we are learning a lot from the incredible speed of development of drones in Ukraine.
Not only are they doing over 2/3 of the ward defences, but they are defending their high water mark and Labour's low showing of 2021. Recent by-elections suggests the Tories are around 12 points down on 2021, and Labour only 8-9 points down.
The Tories are likely to lose substantial seats to the LDs, to Reform and even possibly some to Labour.
(Note, that current local by-elections are almost totally re-runs of 2022-24, with Labour defending a higher base and the Tories lower - meaning Labour 15 points down, Tories only 4 down).
Yer can’t even discuss subjects yer were expressly told not to on someone else’s website any more,
Neil Henderson
@hendopolis
·
34m
OBSERVER; Starmer set to join Europe crisis summit on Trump Ukraine plan #TomorrowsPapersToday
Yes a large proportion own outright, but that's a large proportion who bought decades ago when it was affordable.
For young people, it is a much smaller proportion and the situation has been trending worse.
Fuel and other things have been getting better, yes, which is a good thing to be welcomed; but housing is the massive exception to the trend of everything else, utterly dwarfing it if you don't own your own home and leaving a massive divide of the haves and have-nots, not based on income, but based on do you need to pay current market rates for a roof over your head - or not?
Of course many make a racket out of the current system, living off rents paid by their tenants rather than paying rent themselves.
Labour show no sign of being able to fix them either, so Reform are shooting up in the polls despite being a bunch of dodgy weirdos lead by someone much of the country knows is a waste of space.
We are cursed with politicians who seem to be terrified of trying to solve problems. Labour will dither and spin for five years, then get kicked out.
“A group of European countries has been quietly working on a plan to send troops into Ukraine to help enforce any future peace settlement with Russia. Britain and France are at the forefront of the effort, though details remain scarce.”
https://x.com/annmarie/status/1890878703334515095
I'm not saying that the bottom 50% have not been mistreated, but it is delusional to think that things could not be an awful lot worse for them.
The White House
@WhiteHouse
President Trump is making history!🇺🇸
🏈POTUS attends Super Bowl
🇺🇸Gulf of America
🚫No more paper straws
🤝11 hostages freed in 4 weeks
⚙️Steel/aluminum tariffs
💪Make America Healthy Again Commission
⛽National Energy Dominance Council
@PressSec explains in this MAGA Minute!
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1890543988714717480
Viz, in memory of Blanche.
Seems like not just Trump that wanted the war over ASAP.
That and the ongoing property crisis in China are, IMV, the 2 largest threats to world stability at the moment and yet we spend all our time worrying about Trump.
And he would walk 500 more
And when he meets the ban hammer
He'll be no more Blanche Livermore
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.
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?
Modern housing in much of the UK consumes a huge portion of the wages of young working people. They are living to pay their mortgage or someone else’s.
This is spreading up the wealth column. With juniors in banks, in London, now have no prospect of owning more than a one bed flat in an okish location.
Generation Rent won’t be able to retire. Because they won’t have saved any money to pay the rent. Because it all went on the rent.
Many plastics use phthalates as softeners. Phthalates mimic oestrogen and have a feminising effect, more than halving sperm counts.
PVC is the worst offender.
bird flu will mutate to human-to-human transmission in America thanks to the indifference and RFK will block vaccination and Trump 2.0 will be imploded in the ensuing death and chaos.
-Mass outbreaks of preventable disease
-Welfare checks (sic) being stopped by fratboys
-Civil unrest
Perhaps we should run a sweepstake, although I am not sure any of them will in fact move the dial
Except, very explicitly, for works of necessity or mercy - e.g. emergency help, or looking after those unable to do it for themselves, which includes milking the cows.