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Labour cuts v Tory cuts – politicalbetting.com
Labour cuts v Tory cuts – politicalbetting.com
Britons tend to think Labour's cuts are larger than those made by the coalition government in 2010-15Larger: 30%Similar size: 16%Smaller: 15%(Don't know: 39%)yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
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The usual attack by conservative parties against centre-left parties is that the centre-left wastes money on tax-and-spend policies.
The Democrats lost the election partly because of these types of attacks. The spending on CHIPS Act, Build Back Better, Ukraine assistance etc was used to portray the Democrats as being excessively wasteful & spendthrift. The Democrats added to the potency of these attacks by constantly touting the billions of dollars they were spending on these initiatives.
If a centre-left party demonstrates that it is aggressively cutting spending, then it is actually building valuable political capital to neutralise these types of attacks.
Labour might become unpopular now because of the cuts, but this can be very helpful in the future to build the perception that they are responsible stewards of public finances.
The government will no longer defend a decision, made by the previous government, to allow a controversial new coalmine in Cumbria.
The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, has accepted there was an “error of law” in the decision to grant planning permission for the mine in December 2022.
Consequently, the government will not now be defending two legal challenges next week against the mine – by Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change (SLACC).
It has instead informed the court that the decision to grant planning permission should be quashed.
West Cumbria Mining wants to build the UK’s first deep coal mine in over 30 years. It would produce metallurgical coal, also called coking coal, for use by the steel industry.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c99w1qjp8qko
to this:
The government has offered to buy the coking coal that is essential to keep steel production going at British Steel in Scunthorpe, the BBC has been told.
British Steel has been warning for several days that the raw materials needed to keep its plant's two blast furnaces operational are running out.
Sources said the government was putting the offer in writing to British Steel's Chinese owner Jingye, which will decide on whether to accept it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp311nr7w34o#comments
Who needs private investment in a British coal mine when the government is willing to buy foreign coal.
Britain needs steelmaking for strategic national economic reasons. Facha flogged it off so her mates could profit. Steel is now largely dead in the UK leaving the UK at a serious structural disadvantage.
Where this government try to buy coal from isn't the issue. Where they will be forced to buy steel from is the issue.
In a world where the Orange wazzock is trying to make Gilead as hostile as possible to trade, how can anyone say "the market will provide" with a straight face?
Labour keep coming out with policies designed to appeal to Reform voters, but increasingly losing those voters to Reform. Reform inclined voters just take the validation and go for the real thing, while left wing voters move to the LDs and Greens. Labour cannot out-Farage Farage, they need to campaign against his toxic nativism.
We will see precisely the wrong conclusion drawn from the forthcoming by-election. Labour will lose to Reform on a low turnout, then conclude that it needs to be more like Reform.
I havent voted Labour for a quarter century and cannot see myself doing so any time soon.
They seem to be messing around trying to find ways to avoid this but it will happen eventually.
This is 'aint over by a long shot imho.
Too many people relaxing as if everything is back to normal.
Nationalise now.
Yep, we have learnt nothing.
In the mid-2000s, they started facing problems. AIUI they wanted an investment from the Labour government, which was refused. They closed in 2009, after more than two centuries, to absolutely no noise from local or adjoining Labour MPs.
True, they weren't actually making steel any more; but they were a very good specialist manufacturer using steel. exactly the sort of company that would use British steel....
The whole summer of "Joy" ... the endless appearances by Beyonce & other celebs ... the excessive focus on abortion ... it was just one bad decision after another.
Those who voted LD in 2010 are probably not those who voted LD in 2024 so to ascribe the same motivations and viewpoint would seem to be pretty lazy analysis.
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick."
Mikhail Bakunin
Kamala Harris tours computer chip factory in Michigan
That's if such a voter can even properly remember what happened.
I certainly remember because a government agency that had done some contract work with over the previous five years now and again was shuttered overnight. Whilst another one I had even more dealings with was told to completely redesign its business model mainly via sackings.
I'm suspicious when a party use sits favoured tool: when the Tories privatise, or Labour nationalise. I'm much happier when a party uses the other tools: on the rare occasions when Labour privatise, or the Tories nationalise, as it shows there has been at least some thought.
But I'm in favour not just of nationalisation of the steel-making industry, but also of helping the few specialist manufacturers we have left.
In addition, steelmaking tech changes over the decades - something that has helped destroy the US steelmaking industry. If we nationalise, we also need to invest in the latest tech; not just keeping the old tech going for a few years.
(Picks a copy of 'steelmaking for steelmakers' off his bookshelf. So old it, a hardback book, cost just "£2 Sterling")
I live in a very Reform inclined, left behind, area although there are nice parts of it as well as less nice. It is not all grinding poverty, and the discussions on the local FB groups are full of,it. I will be glad when the locals are over.
Labour are trying to win back its voters it’s lost. You clearly are not one, or not one to target, given your voting over the last 25 years.
How fears of market Armageddon forced Trump into a Truss climbdown
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/09/fears-market-armageddon-forced-trump-truss-climbdown/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first
Heck, even the New York Post is less than glowing:
https://nypost.com/2025/04/09/us-news/how-nyc-ports-are-coping-with-trumps-tariffs/
But the reality was that this time that was not enough when everyone was thinking about a different type of egg.
Confronting what you call “toxic nativism” starts with admitting past failures - Labour were out of Government for 14 years but are far from blameless. Recognising and understanding the concerns many have as a result of mass immigration would be a start.
The language of that recognition has to be careful and precise and let’s not forget the tensions exist both within and across communities. It’s the debate which was the undercurrent of the 2016 Referendum but few were able to enunciate it clearly and without inflaming the situation.
IPhone prices ‘risk doubling’ if production moves to US
Shifting manufacturing to America will be ‘logistically challenging’, warns Wall Street bank
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/09/iphone-prices-risk-doubling-if-production-moves-to-us/
Those who know Trump caved
Those who think Trump is infallable
I posted yesterday that there was no way out for Trump. Even if he climbed down and reinstated status quo ante on tariffs, the world won't say "fair enough" and go back to business as usual. Trump is Fucking Mental. You can't do business with America, can't trust anything America says, certainly can't trust America with your money.
All the 90 pause shows the world is that the clown isn't fully in charge of the circus. Which makes forward planning even more impossible unless you plan for the obvious strategy - avoid the circus.
Labour underestimates how much they are loathed by Reform voters so over estimates winning them back.
Similarly Labour fails to recognise that left wing voters do have other options including other parties, but also not voting.
People choose parties to vote for mostly by the vibe of the party rather than a rational balance sheet look at policies. Labour is delivering a confused message and heartless vibe. Reform is all about unicorns and sunlit uplands. Both are certain to disappoint their voters if in power, but only one is in power at the moment, so the promises of Reform beat the reality of Labour in their minds.
I think the implicit assumption is Trump will reverse policy if pushed back by markets. So therefore markets assume the other destructive policies will be reversed too.
But it took a near crisis in the Treasury market for this to change course. And even then we have 10% higher tariffs globally and over 100% higher on China than we had a week ago.
Further capitulation will be needed to avoid a repeat of recent stresses.
I'm sure Apple-victims know more about the detail than I do, but aren't most of them made in China by Foxconn using 700k workers paid $1-$2 per hour (and presumably more for technicians etc)?
Where will large numbers of workers come from in the USA? Maybe there will be some when Mr Trump has finished crashing the economy.
In 2020, the Democrat Establishment got spooked by Bernie's strong showing & then rapidly coalesced behind the strongest establishment candidate, which was Biden.
This might happen again 2028.
AOC, or some other leftist runs, and puts on a very strong showing. The Dem Establishment again gets spooked and decides to coalesce behind the strongest establishment candidate, which would be the ex-VP & previous Dem candidate.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdNa3sps/
Worse Foxconn’s manufacturing is designed to turn on a dime either ramping up production of x (google phone) when demand for iPhones drop.
That takes 30 years of expertise which the US simply doesn’t have and won’t get without shipping people in
When people say with genuine sincerity that they weren't aware that Musk was going to be in the American government. That Musk & Trump and Vance were making claims against neighbouring NATO countries. That Trump was going to impose tariffs. And I point out that we all knew from over here because its all over the media.
American "news" is now so biased that for the faithful all they receive is propaganda. Living inside a MAGA bubble where what they are told is heavily controlled and selected. All news by definition is selective - and America's "free press" hasn't been for a long time - but this is off the scale.
Start off with low information voters. The majority of voters here as well as there don't have the time or the interest to understand the details of how things work or what is going on. Carefully curate the news fed to them to *keep them in the dark*. Tell them that black is white and do so endlessly until it is accepted. And then you can do anything - as we are witnessing.
A $304bn raid on American taxpayers by the Trump elite. And seemingly most Americans not only don't know about it, but have been told to support it because MURICA.
Though quite obviously the smart Black woman with the cackling laugh would be far better at Tariffwang.
Unlike the Grand Old Duke of York, President Trump marched his investors down to the bottom of the market and has now marched them back up again.
Apart from being a waste of time, money and effort as the markets will probably end up back where they started (no doubt some have made a right killing), has this been a demonstration of weakness or a display of power?
I suspect the answer is both and neither. Opponents and Supporters will no doubt argue ad nauseam the virtue of their side of the argument.
I’m not sure such periods of instability work to anyone’s benefit.
How long that takes who knows and Trump continues to burn political capital with the rest of the world .
It is worth remembering Harris very nearly won as it was, under pretty difficult circumstances where incumbent governments worldwide were getting absolutely mullered and her predecessor had been forced to quit unexpectedly due to old age (which shouldn't really have crept up on an 82 year old unawares, but hey).
And so far, if anything, their claims about Trump have proven optimistic. Sure, that won't affect the cultists, but they're not the target here. The target are those voters who felt the Dems hadn't done enough for them so rolled the dice on voting Trump again, only to find he's caused their incomes to halve in three months. That's the sort of thing people don't forgive and forget. John Major suffered for it and at least that was an honest policy mistake not an act of naked lunacy.
The big risk they run is that the election won't be free and fair, as Trump has been quite open about his attempts to overthrow democracy and subvert the Constitution. Plus, his control of the courts and state processes means he has the tools to do so. In 2020 there was extensive fiddling via voter suppression and we have already seen that start again in North Carolina.
The midterms will be the first real test. So far the signs are discouraging.
Labour is, thus far, not delivering growth at all.
Today's cuts won't matter politically, if they go on to succeed in doing so. If they don't, then they are toast.
Ever heard of the phrase 'too little and too late' ?
Harris should have been at one of those new factories every single day for three months.
What the Dems, and Dem supporters, need to do is to stop denying and defending their mistakes but to accept them and learn from them.
MAGA can think whatever it likes about the brilliance of their guy and their play. The counterparty thinks "these guys are crazy" and acts accordingly. What really winds Trump up is people laughing at him. Must be unfortunate to have so many counterparties doing precisely that.
Ironically of course the Conservative government of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak spent more than both the Coalition Conservative and LD government of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne and the current Labour government of Starmer and Reeves
Someone here will be more over the detail than me, however ... Margaret Taylor-Greene seems to have bought into Treasury Bonds ($750k) before the tariff announcements (Liberation Day), and then bought into Apple and a bunch of other companies before the 90 day suspension.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-buys-dip-203042521.html
It really shouldn’t have even been close . Harris ran a good campaign given the hand she was dealt . I expect she’ll go for California governor which she’ll easily win .
If not, a Harris/AOC ticket would be quite amusing.
"When Kazakhstan introduced population screening for prostate cancer in 2013, it was forced to close the programme within five years because the health service could not cope the influx of low-risk prostate cancers, which did not need treatment."
Here is the problem. Your governments were pouring record amounts in at the top whilst simultaneously presiding over front line services so starved of cash that it was dangerous.
Back when we had Conservative governments, that grotesque level of waste and inefficiency would have been jumped on and eliminated - often ruthlessly. Instead, we had the post-Brexit clown show governments where you talked the talk but delivered the opposite of what you said - which is why you got demolished.
We here very little from your party, and what we hear seems to be focused on bathrooms rather than hospitals. A return to basic conservatism has to be found - efficient public services. Remember those? Where did you go so terribly wrong where you champion waste and tie everything up in red tape?
Not to the advantage of the Trump isn't Fucking Mental camp.
Yes, she's out and about in other parts of the country. But it doesn't harm going for Governor of a very large state to remind them you're a national figure with a bit of heft - it's not like going for Governor of Idaho where you need to prove you're all about Idaho and really like potatoes.
Big tariffs on Chinese imports and 10% tariffs on other imports is what Trump campaigned on and has a mandate to deliver
A lot of the Dem primary voters, particularly in the South, are quite conservative and might find it hard to vote for a Progressive.
Open corruption at the top of the US government. $304bn profit yesterday alone for his cabal, having wiped $trillions of value out of the pockets of ordinary Americans.
That spike in trades shortly before he announced the uturn? They will try and claim that his "today is a great day to buy" Tweet hours earlier was the tell, and that piling in just minutes before his "I definitely won't uturn" uturn was purely coincidental.
The best part? The people who produce the evidence of this heist will be done over as traitors.
I can think of several options, a signal to Moscow perhaps being the most likely.
Starmer isn't going to have 'closed the last British blast furnace' on his CV if he can avoid it. And there's plenty of support in some surprising quarters for nationalisation, should it come to it.
That he believes this to be popular is quietly instructive of course, but not proof of his convictions.
They weren't necessarily bad ideas for a 2-3 year squeeze. Most assets can be sweated a few years longer than planned and new things not built can't be missed. As for staff, few of them are going to leave because of one or two bad pay rounds. Austerity without tears.
Trouble is, all those short-term ruses became a way of life. And whilst they work fine over a couple of years, they start to fail as that turns into a couple of decades. And whilst the new government seems to sort-of recognise that, they are afraid to say it out loud.
That's probably rational. Conservative loyalists get terribly upset at the idea of the £22 billion black hole, but the real mess they left was far worse than that. But rational fear is still fear.
If Trump's tariffs lead to price hikes but no major new manufacturing jobs even AOC could beat Vance or Trump Jr anyway
Not least electorally.
What the Democrats are likely to need in 2028 is someone who draws a very strong contrast with Trump (either politically, or just through demonstrating hyper competence).
Some centrist trimmer like Newsom isn't going to do it.,
Public sector and NHS England workers and those on disability benefits were of course better off under Boris than Starmer
She’s coming across as very angry and irritated on BBC Breakfast.
Yeah, right. How has destroying trust, actively causing long-time friends to go elsewhere, terrifying the bond markets and making the US a far less attractive place to do business ever part of any coherent plan to return America to some form of mythical greatness (back when the genie of racial, sexual and religious equality was firmly stuck in the bottle).
The Dem Establishment opposition to AOC or another leftist will be because of fears about continuation of military support to Israel, and not because of any fears that the leftist will lose the election.
With the Don’t Knows being the highest scoring group, I'd interpret the first two results quoted as Tend to be unsure whether ...
She ran an at least average, and I'd argue pretty good campaign, in the circumstances.
After Biden waited as long as he did to thrown in the towel, it doesn't now seem likely that anyone else would have done much better.
What have seen though is a pseudo-random on/off up/down scattergun approach to tariffs, at best whim driven, potentially in pursuit of fraudulent personal gains.
Worse than the tariffs per se is the uncertainty. Markets hate uncertainty.
@andrew_lilico
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42m
These booming markets do understand that even after his "pause" Trump is still imposing massive tariffs - right? And that his average announced tariff rate now is actually even higher than it was at the time of his "reciprocal tariffs" announcement?
What has struck me is the markets giving a big sigh and Trump having to eat humble pie. YET the biggest (I think) exporters to America (China, Mexico and Canada) still have punitive tariffs. That is still going to be crippling for America isn't it? Plus of course the 10% on everyone else will probably now not stop the normal trade between America and the rest of the world, but will cause inflation in the US.
So a climb down and still a mess.
A great neologism.
It is about what you spend it on.
Your governments were spending record amounts to receive critically cash-starved services. On any measure that is a terrible waste of public money.
I’d argue these cuts were hugely damaging and were the source of many of the social problems we face today as well as those coming from the demands of spending on vulnerable adults and children.
For those craving a turn towards sanity from the Dems next time AOC would be a turn in the opposite direction.