Britain refused to link the indefinite removal of SPS (which has been a disaster for food exports, and ESPECIALLY seafood) to indefinite extension of Boris’s fishing deal.
Instead they’ve simply extended the fishing deal for 12 years.
Boris’s fishing deal IS suboptimal - at least compared with Norway and Iceland, who never sacrificed sovereignty over fishing stocks - but the percentage of quota Europe has been allowed to take has declined year on year, and fishing stocks have been recovering outside the CFP.
For Farage to claim the fishing industry will now die is a simple lie.
The other stuff, on youth mobility, passport gates, musician travel, access to criminal databases, and acess to the EU defence fund, is also excellent.
Again, this is very positive for the UK.
What is the upper age limit on the Youth Mobility Scheme?
30. Similar to that which UK has with other countries, including NZ. Excellent opportunity for UK to attract smart, hard-working Europeans again.
5-7 years too high. Oh well, a different PM can change it if elected.
This is an excellent deal for my children, who will be able to take opportunities in Europe denied to them by the Brexit idiots.
If they’re under 23 I’m pleased for them. The problem never was with youngsters doing a year or two abroad, I think it’s great
How many British children, really, seek out work opportunities in non-Anglophone abroadland? A tiny minority, surely?
Not a tiny minority at all. Lots of British kids - of all classes - used to go and work in Mediterranean resorts in the summer. That’s just one example
This is the Sky summary, which says Pet Passports agreed. That has potential to be positive for Starmer, but it will be "feel" rather than addressing the people and the bots in the Daily Mail and GB News comments.
Yeah!!!!. Such a stupid trivial thing to have lost. Irrelevant to most people, but a real pain in the arse to many of us making spur of the minute holiday plans impossible.
There are 30% more dogs here than there were 5-10 years ago (estimates are quite varied but all have the same trend). That's maybe an extra 3-4% of the population owning one or several. It won't swing that many votes, perhaps, but it's a .. er .. positive stroke for the Govt vote.
Cats are also up, but I don't think Tibbles gets taken on international holidays usually (caravanners and campavanners maybe excepted) - single cat ladies may know more than I do.
There's a Facebook page I follow of someone who has a cat that works as a therapy cat in hospitals in London. She's from Portugal and sometimes posts pictures of them going to visit family there. It's quite funny really seeing her take a very chilled cat on a plane!
No you don't get paid. In fact it costs money to do - annual membership and compulsory insurance through Pets As Therapy. In darker moments I wonder how much the PAT management get paid...
Our dog used to be a PAT dog but stopped after covid as he'd switched to raw food on the vets advice and they refused to take him as he was clearly a H&S risk at that point (!)
This is the Sky summary, which says Pet Passports agreed. That has potential to be positive for Starmer, but it will be "feel" rather than addressing the people and the bots in the Daily Mail and GB News comments.
Yeah!!!!. Such a stupid trivial thing to have lost. Irrelevant to most people, but a real pain in the arse to many of us making spur of the minute holiday plans impossible.
There are 30% more dogs here than there were 5-10 years ago (estimates are quite varied but all have the same trend). That's maybe an extra 3-4% of the population owning one or several. It won't swing that many votes, perhaps, but it's a .. er .. positive stroke for the Govt vote.
Cats are also up, but I don't think Tibbles gets taken on international holidays usually (caravanners and campavanners maybe excepted) - single cat ladies may know more than I do.
There's a Facebook page I follow of someone who has a cat that works as a therapy cat in hospitals in London. She's from Portugal and sometimes posts pictures of them going to visit family there. It's quite funny really seeing her take a very chilled cat on a plane!
This is the Sky summary, which says Pet Passports agreed. That has potential to be positive for Starmer, but it will be "feel" rather than addressing the people and the bots in the Daily Mail and GB News comments.
Yeah!!!!. Such a stupid trivial thing to have lost. Irrelevant to most people, but a real pain in the arse to many of us making spur of the minute holiday plans impossible.
There are 30% more dogs here than there were 5-10 years ago (estimates are quite varied but all have the same trend). That's maybe an extra 3-4% of the population owning one or several. It won't swing that many votes, perhaps, but it's a .. er .. positive stroke for the Govt vote.
Cats are also up, but I don't think Tibbles gets taken on international holidays usually (caravanners and campavanners maybe excepted) - single cat ladies may know more than I do.
There's a Facebook page I follow of someone who has a cat that works as a therapy cat in hospitals in London. She's from Portugal and sometimes posts pictures of them going to visit family there. It's quite funny really seeing her take a very chilled cat on a plane!
No you don't get paid. In fact it costs money to do - annual membership and compulsory insurance through Pets As Therapy. In darker moments I wonder how much the PAT management get paid...
Our dog used to be a PAT dog but stopped after covid as he'd switched to raw food on the vets advice and they refused to take him as he was clearly a H&S risk at that point (!)
The idea is a great one though.
My folks' black lab (auto"corrected" to lad - that would have read differently!), Edith who has featured here, Is a PAT dog and she'll be working right now. Mum takes her to a care home in Wootton Bassett every Monday afternoon
This is similar to one of Lord Denning's celebrated judgments, about cricket balls. Nothing on earth was going to get Denning to stop people playing cricket. Miller v Jackson. Few write judgments in this style today.
Miserabilist is about right. It was an estimated ball every 2 days at the start, and the school then took measures such as a net over the pitch.
The buggers still took legal action over as I take it the earlier period. If you move in next to a school, expect games.
"We can no longer use our swimming pool." FFS. They are worth North of £20m.
At least the Judge only gave them nominal damages, and refused to issue a ban. It's time for the school to introduce outdoor band practice, and develop a Kazoo Parade Band like in Yank Land.
A big hedge would cost less than the Court Fees.
If the net isn’t stopping the balls, maybe they need a bigger and better net. 170 balls in 11 months is a bit much.
The couple sought legal advice and a letter was sent in 2022 to the school over the matter. Mitigations were then made, including the installation of a net over the top of the pitch to prevent balls going astray, which reduced the number of balls.
Britain refused to link the indefinite removal of SPS (which has been a disaster for food exports, and ESPECIALLY seafood) to indefinite extension of Boris’s fishing deal.
Instead they’ve simply extended the fishing deal for 12 years.
Boris’s fishing deal IS suboptimal - at least compared with Norway and Iceland, who never sacrificed sovereignty over fishing stocks - but the percentage of quota Europe has been allowed to take has declined year on year, and fishing stocks have been recovering outside the CFP.
For Farage to claim the fishing industry will now die is a simple lie.
The other stuff, on youth mobility, passport gates, musician travel, access to criminal databases, and acess to the EU defence fund, is also excellent.
Again, this is very positive for the UK.
What is the upper age limit on the Youth Mobility Scheme?
30. Similar to that which UK has with other countries, including NZ. Excellent opportunity for UK to attract smart, hard-working Europeans again.
5-7 years too high. Oh well, a different PM can change it if elected.
This is an excellent deal for my children, who will be able to take opportunities in Europe denied to them by the Brexit idiots.
If they’re under 23 I’m pleased for them. The problem never was with youngsters doing a year or two abroad, I think it’s great
How many British children, really, seek out work opportunities in non-Anglophone abroadland? A tiny minority, surely?
Not a tiny minority at all. Lots of British kids - of all classes - used to go and work in Mediterranean resorts in the summer. That’s just one example
This is the Sky summary, which says Pet Passports agreed. That has potential to be positive for Starmer, but it will be "feel" rather than addressing the people and the bots in the Daily Mail and GB News comments.
Yeah!!!!. Such a stupid trivial thing to have lost. Irrelevant to most people, but a real pain in the arse to many of us making spur of the minute holiday plans impossible.
There are 30% more dogs here than there were 5-10 years ago (estimates are quite varied but all have the same trend). That's maybe an extra 3-4% of the population owning one or several. It won't swing that many votes, perhaps, but it's a .. er .. positive stroke for the Govt vote.
Cats are also up, but I don't think Tibbles gets taken on international holidays usually (caravanners and campavanners maybe excepted) - single cat ladies may know more than I do.
There's a Facebook page I follow of someone who has a cat that works as a therapy cat in hospitals in London. She's from Portugal and sometimes posts pictures of them going to visit family there. It's quite funny really seeing her take a very chilled cat on a plane!
There are concerning aspects of this deal where we - once again - come under the jurisdiction of the ECJ - in energy and agrifood, especially. We all know the ECJ does mission creep
However I am much less concerned than I might be. Why? Because Europe is swinging hard right. Meloni is in power in Italy, Le Pen is poised in France, the AfD are surging in Germany, the Danish Democrats are basically Franco, that brilliant Simioni guy nearly won in Romania, Orban is superb. Love the True Finns, go the Swedish Democrats (who are basically Pinochet plus Abba). This is a new alt.right Europe I can REALLY get behind, alongside @kinabalu
Europe has changed. This is my kind of Europe. If they keep moving to the right (and there is no sign they are stopping) I might campaign to REJOIN
This is the Sky summary, which says Pet Passports agreed. That has potential to be positive for Starmer, but it will be "feel" rather than addressing the people and the bots in the Daily Mail and GB News comments.
Yeah!!!!. Such a stupid trivial thing to have lost. Irrelevant to most people, but a real pain in the arse to many of us making spur of the minute holiday plans impossible.
There are 30% more dogs here than there were 5-10 years ago (estimates are quite varied but all have the same trend). That's maybe an extra 3-4% of the population owning one or several. It won't swing that many votes, perhaps, but it's a .. er .. positive stroke for the Govt vote.
Cats are also up, but I don't think Tibbles gets taken on international holidays usually (caravanners and campavanners maybe excepted) - single cat ladies may know more than I do.
There's a Facebook page I follow of someone who has a cat that works as a therapy cat in hospitals in London. She's from Portugal and sometimes posts pictures of them going to visit family there. It's quite funny really seeing her take a very chilled cat on a plane!
No you don't get paid. In fact it costs money to do - annual membership and compulsory insurance through Pets As Therapy. In darker moments I wonder how much the PAT management get paid...
Our dog used to be a PAT dog but stopped after covid as he'd switched to raw food on the vets advice and they refused to take him as he was clearly a H&S risk at that point (!)
The idea is a great one though.
My folks' black lab (auto"corrected" to lad - that would have read differently!), Edith who has featured here, Is a PAT dog and she'll be working right now. Mum takes her to a care home in Wootton Bassett every Monday afternoon
Mrs P and our dog Troy both enjoyed going to the care home weekly, and I think it did the residents a lot of good - at least those who were dog lovers, they skipped past @Leon's door.
Most people probably want jobs that are slightly better paid and slightly more interesting than the ones they're doing. They don't want the government to give them a bit of extra money so they can spend more time sitting on the sofa staring at a screen. But the elites would love that because it gives them another opportunity to feel superior to ordinary people, which explains the popularity of UBI with the think-tank set.
The point is not to give anyone more money. It is to remove the bizarre incentives and cliff edges.
We already give unemployed people money. Probably more than £12k in many cases.
We also spend a vast amount chasing people about over tiny amounts.
Give them the 12k. End of.
That is my ballpark starting place. Give everyone the tax free allowance in cash. But that removes practically all welfare payments (with exceptions for things like severe disability needs which are based on medical not financial considerations). And all income is taxed - if you work, you pay.
It would be expensive. But it will also save a fortune in admin costs, and turbocharge the economy as people are freed from employed slavery stuck in jobs they can't afford to quit. Now they can - go and retrain, reskill, start a business. Whatever you want.
Apart from 12k is less than many already get on benefits
Starmer might get an actual poll boost from this. Some Remainery LDs and Greens will return. And he won't lose any to Reform
How many Brexiteering fisherfolk or ardent ultra-Leavers are in the 22% presently supporting Labour? Roughly zero, so that's not an issue
He will also get a personal boost. He's doing prime ministery things in a prime minister-y way and delivering stuff people will like - the e-gates, the pet passports, making it easier for businesses to import/export, even the youth mobility might easily please more than it annoys
Part of the difficulty post-2016 was that almost everyone had bits of EU membership that annoyed them massively, but a solid chunk that they quite liked. That would have been workable, had it been the same positives and negatives for everyone, but mostly they weren't.
Hence it's not been easy to find Brexit freedoms really worth exploiting, because most of them are not that popular (take the massive US Trade Deal as an extreme example of that). And unpicking bits of the 2019 settlement that don't go near the red lines is likely to be popular.
Tricky one for the opposition. They can't endorse the government (especially when the government are saying, fairly loudly, that Johnson's deal was bad for the country), but opposing these measures makes them look more than a bit mad.
They prattle on about the rights of the "indigenous people"
Who is that then? Its not the Anglo-Saxons...
They’re the RW equivalent of Corbyn and the Islamic Alliance on the left, and Farage seems to be copying Starmer’s act of having nothing to do with them so as not to scare the centrists
Britain refused to link the indefinite removal of SPS (which has been a disaster for food exports, and ESPECIALLY seafood) to indefinite extension of Boris’s fishing deal.
Instead they’ve simply extended the fishing deal for 12 years.
Boris’s fishing deal IS suboptimal - at least compared with Norway and Iceland, who never sacrificed sovereignty over fishing stocks - but the percentage of quota Europe has been allowed to take has declined year on year, and fishing stocks have been recovering outside the CFP.
For Farage to claim the fishing industry will now die is a simple lie.
The other stuff, on youth mobility, passport gates, musician travel, access to criminal databases, and acess to the EU defence fund, is also excellent.
Again, this is very positive for the UK.
What is the upper age limit on the Youth Mobility Scheme?
30. Similar to that which UK has with other countries, including NZ. Excellent opportunity for UK to attract smart, hard-working Europeans again.
5-7 years too high. Oh well, a different PM can change it if elected.
This is an excellent deal for my children, who will be able to take opportunities in Europe denied to them by the Brexit idiots.
If they’re under 23 I’m pleased for them. The problem never was with youngsters doing a year or two abroad, I think it’s great
How many British children, really, seek out work opportunities in non-Anglophone abroadland? A tiny minority, surely?
Not a tiny minority at all. Lots of British kids - of all classes - used to go and work in Mediterranean resorts in the summer. That’s just one example
The dollar is sliding and US Treasury yields are rising in the wake of Friday's Moody's downgrade of US debt. My latest on why the path down Mount Stupid will remain long and bumpy and the rising risk of an American Liz Truss moment
According to news reports, Beyoncé was paid $11,000,000 to walk onto a stage, quickly ENDORSE KAMALA, and walk off to loud booing for never having performed, NOT EVEN ONE SONG! Remember, the Democrats and Kamala illegally paid her millions of Dollars for doing nothing other than giving Kamala a full throated ENDORSEMENT. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! IT IS AN ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION! BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, OPRAH, BONO AND, PERHAPS, MANY OTHERS, HAVE A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO!!!
These cyber-attackers need to be caught and given harsh sentences to deter others.
"Criminal records stolen in cyberattack on Legal Aid Agency Sensitive personal information of online applicants, including financial details and addresses, downloaded by hackers" (£)
There are concerning aspects of this deal where we - once again - come under the jurisdiction of the ECJ - in energy and agrifood, especially. We all know the ECJ does mission creep
However I am much less concerned than I might be. Why? Because Europe is swinging hard right. Meloni is in power in Italy, Le Pen is poised in France, the AfD are surging in Germany, the Danish Democrats are basically Franco, that brilliant Simioni guy nearly won in Romania, Orban is superb. Love the True Finns, go the Swedish Democrats (who are basically Pinochet plus Abba). This is a new alt.right Europe I can REALLY get behind, alongside @kinabalu
Europe has changed. This is my kind of Europe. If they keep moving to the right (and there is no sign they are stopping) I might campaign to REJOIN
Naughty Leon... Only some of your fash love is requited...
Starmer might get an actual poll boost from this. Some Remainery LDs and Greens will return. And he won't lose any to Reform
How many Brexiteering fisherfolk or ardent ultra-Leavers are in the 22% presently supporting Labour? Roughly zero, so that's not an issue
He will also get a personal boost. He's doing prime ministery things in a prime minister-y way and delivering stuff people will like - the e-gates, the pet passports, making it easier for businesses to import/export, even the youth mobility might easily please more than it annoys
Part of the difficulty post-2016 was that almost everyone had bits of EU membership that annoyed them massively, but a solid chunk that they quite liked. That would have been workable, had it been the same positives and negatives for everyone, but mostly they weren't.
Hence it's not been easy to find Brexit freedoms really worth exploiting, because most of them are not that popular (take the massive US Trade Deal as an extreme example of that). And unpicking bits of the 2019 settlement that don't go near the red lines is likely to be popular.
Tricky one for the opposition. They can't endorse the government (especially when the government are saying, fairly loudly, that Johnson's deal was bad for the country), but opposing these measures makes them look more than a bit mad.
The (traditional) Opposition seem to be going Ker-plop, but Starmer has some way to go before he gets his High Hopes.
These cyber-attackers need to be caught and given harsh sentences to deter others.
"Criminal records stolen in cyberattack on Legal Aid Agency Sensitive personal information of online applicants, including financial details and addresses, downloaded by hackers" (£)
Oh dear oh dear oh dear. So we've failed to secure a deal giving us lots of benefits without the EU getting anything. Starmer is such a pushover. Couldn't negotiate his way out of a paper bag. Be grateful he didn't give away Gibraltar while he was at it. He didn't, did he?
That was the forecast on here from last week.
Just remember no one can negotiate like Johnson and Frost. No borders in the Irish Sea from them, no siree, it was just all copper bottomed awesomeness.
They prattle on about the rights of the "indigenous people"
Who is that then? Its not the Anglo-Saxons...
They’re the RW equivalent of Corbyn and the Islamic Alliance on the left, and Farage seems to be copying Starmer’s act of having nothing to do with them so as not to scare the centrists
Homeland Party are a (choose your word)-Right Groupuscule. A little flea on a minor flea, upon their back to bite them.
Patriotic Alternative was founded by Mark Collett, who was previously the Publicity Director of the BNP.
And the Homeland Party splintered off Patriotic Alternative. They push things like the Great Replacement Theory.
According to news reports, Beyoncé was paid $11,000,000 to walk onto a stage, quickly ENDORSE KAMALA, and walk off to loud booing for never having performed, NOT EVEN ONE SONG! Remember, the Democrats and Kamala illegally paid her millions of Dollars for doing nothing other than giving Kamala a full throated ENDORSEMENT. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! IT IS AN ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION! BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, OPRAH, BONO AND, PERHAPS, MANY OTHERS, HAVE A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO!!!
These cyber-attackers need to be caught and given harsh sentences to deter others.
"Criminal records stolen in cyberattack on Legal Aid Agency Sensitive personal information of online applicants, including financial details and addresses, downloaded by hackers" (£)
Boris “No borders down the Irish Sea” has come out against the Starmer deal.
Such a fat, useless, waster. Tell us again about your immigration achievements, Boris.
Farage should back the deal as part of a strategy of hugging Starmer to death and kicking the Tories when they're down.
Its a good idea - lets see what Kemi says at her press conference.
The key thing here is that Brexit happened - we left. All of this kerfuffle has been about the choices we made *after* we left. Nobody credible* is claiming that the existing deal works. So as the new deal makes trade easier and makes the economy better for ordinary people without giving away anything significant, why not back it?
The battlelines of the future about where we go as an independent nation state. The Tories seem obsessed with repeat fighting a battle they claim to have won. Farage could move soooooo far beyond them if he did as you suggest. Would be a tactical masterstroke.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
These cyber-attackers need to be caught and given harsh sentences to deter others.
"Criminal records stolen in cyberattack on Legal Aid Agency Sensitive personal information of online applicants, including financial details and addresses, downloaded by hackers" (£)
According to news reports, Beyoncé was paid $11,000,000 to walk onto a stage, quickly ENDORSE KAMALA, and walk off to loud booing for never having performed, NOT EVEN ONE SONG! Remember, the Democrats and Kamala illegally paid her millions of Dollars for doing nothing other than giving Kamala a full throated ENDORSEMENT. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! IT IS AN ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION! BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, OPRAH, BONO AND, PERHAPS, MANY OTHERS, HAVE A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO!!!
Boris “No borders down the Irish Sea” has come out against the Starmer deal.
Such a fat, useless, waster. Tell us again about your immigration achievements, Boris.
Farage should back the deal as part of a strategy of hugging Starmer to death and kicking the Tories when they're down.
Its a good idea - lets see what Kemi says at her press conference.
The key thing here is that Brexit happened - we left. All of this kerfuffle has been about the choices we made *after* we left. Nobody credible* is claiming that the existing deal works. So as the new deal makes trade easier and makes the economy better for ordinary people without giving away anything significant, why not back it?
The battlelines of the future about where we go as an independent nation state. The Tories seem obsessed with repeat fighting a battle they claim to have won. Farage could move soooooo far beyond them if he did as you suggest. Would be a tactical masterstroke.
*The Tories are not credible
Shortly after the announcement, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she was "gobsmacked" by the series of deals the prime minister has signed.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Rishi’s only competence was appointing Hunt to the Treasury to clean up after Truss.
And even then, he/they debauched themselves with an unaffordable reduction in national insurance premised on savage future cuts to public services which they knew were not deliverable. Essentially, it was a giveaway designed purely to minimise Tory losses.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
The Brits don’t eat enough fish . And an SPS deal means UK fisheries can sell more into the EU especially catch that needs to be exported live .
We should change the fact that we don't though.
The minor concern of heavy metals notwithstanding, we don't eat enough fish. 'Five portions of fruit and veg a day' was made up by American fruit and veg growers with no medical basis, so I don't see why 'two portions of fish a week' cannot be a national campaign, with considerably more basis in science.
Almost all healthy eating advice has been made up with little evidence. There is a lot of evidence that eating a varied diet is good for you, and that eating veg and fruit is good, and not too much meat. But precisely HOW MUCH is very hard to determine. And people who run these campaigns like to have a simple message. Its unarguable the the 5 a day message has stuck and much better than simply saying 'eat lots of fruit and veg".
Others that are similar - walking 10,000 steps - no scientific basis for it being 10000. Drinking 2 litres of water a day - utter rubbish - we get fluid from most things we consume and no, coffee does not dehydrate you.
I agree to a point, but what is a 'mixed diet'? And actually, in terms of nutrition per gram, meat is absolutely the King of foods (along with eggs and other animal products), but has been demonised (unfairly in my view) largely because there is more profit in cash crops like soy.
Fruit and veg are fine - they can be good, and rubbish.
There is stuff in fish that we can't easily get elsewhere though, and history tells us that we used to eat a whole lot more of it than we do now.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
Deserves more than a like. In no way does this comment from the BBC provide useful, predicative, or critical insight. It’s speculation from inside a weird mental trap.
Boris “No borders down the Irish Sea” has come out against the Starmer deal.
Such a fat, useless, waster. Tell us again about your immigration achievements, Boris.
Farage should back the deal as part of a strategy of hugging Starmer to death and kicking the Tories when they're down.
Its a good idea - lets see what Kemi says at her press conference.
The key thing here is that Brexit happened - we left. All of this kerfuffle has been about the choices we made *after* we left. Nobody credible* is claiming that the existing deal works. So as the new deal makes trade easier and makes the economy better for ordinary people without giving away anything significant, why not back it?
The battlelines of the future about where we go as an independent nation state. The Tories seem obsessed with repeat fighting a battle they claim to have won. Farage could move soooooo far beyond them if he did as you suggest. Would be a tactical masterstroke.
*The Tories are not credible
It would be smart politics from Farage if he really wants power (probably the smart way of doing it is to say that some of it is very welcome but he takes issue with other elements) - that leaves Kemi flailing but allows him to continue his grievance narrative.
If it’s all just sell out and surrender, he’s retreated to his usual protest politics.
I suspect he’ll go with the latter, but we’ll see.
Rishi’s only competence was appointing Hunt to the Treasury to clean up after Truss.
And even then, he/they debauched themselves with an unaffordable reduction in national insurance premised on savage future cuts to public services which they knew were not deliverable. Essentially, it was a giveaway designed purely to minimise Tory losses.
Keir Starmer says “Britain is back on the world stage”
He hails recent deals with India and US and says now a “landmark deal” has been secured with the EU too
I don’t like Keir or Labour v much. But it’s churlish to deny the reality of this achievement.
To the extent that we are 'on the world stage', with these agreements, there is only one thing responsible, and that's Brexit. I don't expect Sir Rentagob to acknowledge that, but it's still true.
Most people probably want jobs that are slightly better paid and slightly more interesting than the ones they're doing. They don't want the government to give them a bit of extra money so they can spend more time sitting on the sofa staring at a screen. But the elites would love that because it gives them another opportunity to feel superior to ordinary people, which explains the popularity of UBI with the think-tank set.
The point is not to give anyone more money. It is to remove the bizarre incentives and cliff edges.
We already give unemployed people money. Probably more than £12k in many cases.
We also spend a vast amount chasing people about over tiny amounts.
Give them the 12k. End of.
That is my ballpark starting place. Give everyone the tax free allowance in cash. But that removes practically all welfare payments (with exceptions for things like severe disability needs which are based on medical not financial considerations). And all income is taxed - if you work, you pay.
It would be expensive. But it will also save a fortune in admin costs, and turbocharge the economy as people are freed from employed slavery stuck in jobs they can't afford to quit. Now they can - go and retrain, reskill, start a business. Whatever you want.
Apart from 12k is less than many already get on benefits
A lot less when you add free house, council tax , etc , etc , etc
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
It's a balanced narrative!
Balance negativity for the Government with positivity for Farage/Johnson.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
The Brits don’t eat enough fish . And an SPS deal means UK fisheries can sell more into the EU especially catch that needs to be exported live .
We should change the fact that we don't though.
The minor concern of heavy metals notwithstanding, we don't eat enough fish. 'Five portions of fruit and veg a day' was made up by American fruit and veg growers with no medical basis, so I don't see why 'two portions of fish a week' cannot be a national campaign, with considerably more basis in science.
Almost all healthy eating advice has been made up with little evidence. There is a lot of evidence that eating a varied diet is good for you, and that eating veg and fruit is good, and not too much meat. But precisely HOW MUCH is very hard to determine. And people who run these campaigns like to have a simple message. Its unarguable the the 5 a day message has stuck and much better than simply saying 'eat lots of fruit and veg".
Others that are similar - walking 10,000 steps - no scientific basis for it being 10000. Drinking 2 litres of water a day - utter rubbish - we get fluid from most things we consume and no, coffee does not dehydrate you.
I agree to a point, but what is a 'mixed diet'? And actually, in terms of nutrition per gram, meat is absolutely the King of foods (along with eggs and other animal products), but has been demonised (unfairly in my view) largely because there is more profit in cash crops like soy.
Fruit and veg are fine - they can be good, and rubbish.
There is stuff in fish that we can't easily get elsewhere though, and history tells us that we used to eat a whole lot more of it than we do now.
"Nutrition per gram" is a very subjective category.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
It's a balanced narrative!
Balance negativity for the Government with positivity for Farage/Johnson.
Left to the Tories and Reform they would shut down the BBC .
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
It's a balanced narrative!
Balance negativity for the Government with positivity for Farage/Johnson.
You know you're really for the toilet when you're a Labour Government and the BBC is turning on you.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
That fundamentally doesn’t work unless there’s a redistributive element around the UK. So I think you need to continue a banding style system rather than a flat rate, but you update the bands.
One thing the government should absolutely have committed to in the first budget was a full re-banding exercise for Council Tax, with full implementation of periodic re-banding. That was the time to do it, unfortunately it feels like the opportunity has been lost.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
Quite right, totally untenable and totally unsolvable.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
It's a balanced narrative!
Balance negativity for the Government with positivity for Farage/Johnson.
Left to the Tories and Reform they would shut down the BBC .
And yet they continually arse lick Farage .
They believe, rather stupidly, that their job is to reflect public opinion, and thereby provide a platform for populist film-flam.
But their job first and foremost is to explain and educate the audience in as unbiased manner as possible.
In part that does indeed providing Farage a platform, but it also implies subjecting his claims to scrutiny from both political opponents and policy experts.
The Brits don’t eat enough fish . And an SPS deal means UK fisheries can sell more into the EU especially catch that needs to be exported live .
We should change the fact that we don't though.
The minor concern of heavy metals notwithstanding, we don't eat enough fish. 'Five portions of fruit and veg a day' was made up by American fruit and veg growers with no medical basis, so I don't see why 'two portions of fish a week' cannot be a national campaign, with considerably more basis in science.
Almost all healthy eating advice has been made up with little evidence. There is a lot of evidence that eating a varied diet is good for you, and that eating veg and fruit is good, and not too much meat. But precisely HOW MUCH is very hard to determine. And people who run these campaigns like to have a simple message. Its unarguable the the 5 a day message has stuck and much better than simply saying 'eat lots of fruit and veg".
Others that are similar - walking 10,000 steps - no scientific basis for it being 10000. Drinking 2 litres of water a day - utter rubbish - we get fluid from most things we consume and no, coffee does not dehydrate you.
I agree to a point, but what is a 'mixed diet'? And actually, in terms of nutrition per gram, meat is absolutely the King of foods (along with eggs and other animal products), but has been demonised (unfairly in my view) largely because there is more profit in cash crops like soy.
Fruit and veg are fine - they can be good, and rubbish.
There is stuff in fish that we can't easily get elsewhere though, and history tells us that we used to eat a whole lot more of it than we do now.
"Nutrition per gram" is a very subjective category.
Its also not just about nutrition. One of the factors that can lead to colon cancer is not having the right diet. I'm pretty sure that you can get by very well on meat alone (is that not what the Eskimo people essentially did?) but I'm not convinced it is good overall. That said a body is designed to do one thing - reproduce and pass on those genes. You don't need to be a healthy 85 year old to do that.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
I think a large majority of people would have a council tax cut under a flat rate, simply because the bands and regional inequalities are so skewed. Even I would get a cut in central Edinburgh.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
That fundamentally doesn’t work unless there’s a redistributive element around the UK. So I think you need to continue a banding style system rather than a flat rate, but you update the bands.
One thing the government should absolutely have committed to in the first budget was a full re-banding exercise for Council Tax, with full implementation of periodic re-banding. That was the time to do it, unfortunately it feels like the opportunity has been lost.
Property tax would be collected centrally I assume not by councils and the majority of council funding already comes from central government so there is already an easy method for the redistribution.
Otherwise a property tax makes no sense if its not taxing those who's house prices have risen the most more than someone who's house hasn't risen by nearly as much
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
I think a large majority of people would have a council tax cut under a flat rate, simply because the bands and regional inequalities are so skewed. Even I would get a cut in central Edinburgh.
And the rest of us should have increased costs deferred until eventual sale. While having the value of our properties flattered by some big planning liberalisation.
The Brits don’t eat enough fish . And an SPS deal means UK fisheries can sell more into the EU especially catch that needs to be exported live .
We should change the fact that we don't though.
The minor concern of heavy metals notwithstanding, we don't eat enough fish. 'Five portions of fruit and veg a day' was made up by American fruit and veg growers with no medical basis, so I don't see why 'two portions of fish a week' cannot be a national campaign, with considerably more basis in science.
Almost all healthy eating advice has been made up with little evidence. There is a lot of evidence that eating a varied diet is good for you, and that eating veg and fruit is good, and not too much meat. But precisely HOW MUCH is very hard to determine. And people who run these campaigns like to have a simple message. Its unarguable the the 5 a day message has stuck and much better than simply saying 'eat lots of fruit and veg".
Others that are similar - walking 10,000 steps - no scientific basis for it being 10000. Drinking 2 litres of water a day - utter rubbish - we get fluid from most things we consume and no, coffee does not dehydrate you.
I agree to a point, but what is a 'mixed diet'? And actually, in terms of nutrition per gram, meat is absolutely the King of foods (along with eggs and other animal products), but has been demonised (unfairly in my view) largely because there is more profit in cash crops like soy.
Fruit and veg are fine - they can be good, and rubbish.
There is stuff in fish that we can't easily get elsewhere though, and history tells us that we used to eat a whole lot more of it than we do now.
"Nutrition per gram" is a very subjective category.
And do you include all the animal feed in the denominator?
Boris “No borders down the Irish Sea” has come out against the Starmer deal.
Such a fat, useless, waster. Tell us again about your immigration achievements, Boris.
Farage should back the deal as part of a strategy of hugging Starmer to death and kicking the Tories when they're down.
Its a good idea - lets see what Kemi says at her press conference.
The key thing here is that Brexit happened - we left. All of this kerfuffle has been about the choices we made *after* we left. Nobody credible* is claiming that the existing deal works. So as the new deal makes trade easier and makes the economy better for ordinary people without giving away anything significant, why not back it?
The battlelines of the future about where we go as an independent nation state. The Tories seem obsessed with repeat fighting a battle they claim to have won. Farage could move soooooo far beyond them if he did as you suggest. Would be a tactical masterstroke.
*The Tories are not credible
Kemi will do what she always does; pick a fight, and lose.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Do you have a link to the document?
Anyhow it looks like pet passports are coming back, if with a wait, so Mr Dog is very happy.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
Yes, BBC R4 news summary at 2pm was: Starmer's done a deal with the EU. Some fishermen are unhappy. Farage and Badenoch are unhappy. Then Lord Frost featured, being scathing. That was it. Utterly unbalanced.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Do you have a link to the document?
Anyhow it looks like pet passports are coming back, if with a wait, so Mr Dog is very happy.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
Except if it's replacing council tax then it should be down to local authorities what percentage to charge.
That said, I don't see why someone in a million pound house shouldn't pay a lot more than someone in a £250k house. The very fact of that price difference means that they're not identical. Location matters.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
Except if it's replacing council tax then it should be down to local authorities what percentage to charge.
That said, I don't see why someone in a million pound house shouldn't pay a lot more than someone in a £250k house. The very fact of that price difference means that they're not identical. Location matters.
By identical I obviously meant the amenities the house itself offers, such as number of bedrooms/bathrooms, size etc
Skimming this thread you'd think we'd just rejoined the EU.
It's actually bad for purist Rejoiners
If Britain has a decent deal with the EU, that largely satisfies both sides, why on earth would any UK government expend all of its political capital to get and win a referendum on Proper Rejoin? A referendum they would be extremely likely to lose, due to the enormous risks on both sides (a possible veto, are we in the euro, Free Movement, huge new instability, and so on)
No UK government will ever call that plebiscite. So we are now forever cemented into a position akin to Switzerland or Norway, where both sides give and take in negotiations, the smaller countries yielding some powers in return for the freedom of not being in the EU's political structures
This deal means we will never Rejoin (that was the case anyway, but this nails down the coffin lid, for sure)
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
Except if it's replacing council tax then it should be down to local authorities what percentage to charge.
That said, I don't see why someone in a million pound house shouldn't pay a lot more than someone in a £250k house. The very fact of that price difference means that they're not identical. Location matters.
By identical I obviously meant the amenities the house itself offers, such as number of bedrooms/bathrooms, size etc
Also I have to ask whats the point of bringing it a local property tax if it results basically in everyone still paying the same as they did under council tax? Its a waste of time and energy may as well just keep council tax
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Do you have a link to the document?
Anyhow it looks like pet passports are coming back, if with a wait, so Mr Dog is very happy.
I hadn't appreciated they'd been removed tbh. So no taking dogs on hols to France etc. at the moment?
Skimming this thread you'd think we'd just rejoined the EU.
The airtime in Ireland on the deal is split between an economist (I think) saying that it makes very little difference, and a fisherman bemoaning that Brexit has been sold out all the way along, and looking forward to a Reform government to do it properly.
That Farage's lot are leading the polls in Britain was news to my in-laws.
The change in the phytosanitary rules should make life a lot easier for the NI border situation. At least until Farage takes over and Britain wastes yet more years obsessing over its relationship with Europe to the detriment of all concerned.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
Yes, BBC R4 news summary at 2pm was: Starmer's done a deal with the EU. Some fishermen are unhappy. Farage and Badenoch are unhappy. Then Lord Frost featured, being scathing. That was it. Utterly unbalanced.
I'm a Leaver and abhor this craven, useless government , yet I am essentially content with this deal. It is a sensible compromise between two powers that are bound to trade freely, and benefit from doing so
On the face of it, it is not the capitulation I expected from Starmer and his team. They have won real positives in return for a surrender on fishing. Both sides stand to gain
So if they can persuade an enemy like me that this is Not Bad, even Quite Good, then they should be able to persuade Britain. This is on the Labour comms team. Can they do it?
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
Except if it's replacing council tax then it should be down to local authorities what percentage to charge.
That said, I don't see why someone in a million pound house shouldn't pay a lot more than someone in a £250k house. The very fact of that price difference means that they're not identical. Location matters.
By identical I obviously meant the amenities the house itself offers, such as number of bedrooms/bathrooms, size etc
Also I have to ask whats the point of bringing it a local property tax if it results basically in everyone still paying the same as they did under council tax? Its a waste of time and energy may as well just keep council tax
It wouldn't.
As you note, a £1m would pay four times the amount that a £250k house does. By contrast, at the moment a Band H house only pays three times as much as a Band A despite being a minimum of eight times the value in 1991 (since when the disparity has only grown).
On your earlier note, identical houses in terms of layout, facilities and quality have always varied wildly in price depending on where they are - and, consequently, who can afford to live in them. We can't simply ignore that part of the equation. A 3-bed semi in Ravenscliffe does not have the same desireability as a 3-bed semi in Alwoodley.
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
It's a balanced narrative!
Balance negativity for the Government with positivity for Farage/Johnson.
Left to the Tories and Reform they would shut down the BBC .
And yet they continually arse lick Farage .
They believe, rather stupidly, that their job is to reflect public opinion, and thereby provide a platform for populist film-flam.
But their job first and foremost is to explain and educate the audience in as unbiased manner as possible.
In part that does indeed providing Farage a platform, but it also implies subjecting his claims to scrutiny from both political opponents and policy experts.
Do you think the BBC ever bought into the public opinion of voting for Brexit?
This is similar to one of Lord Denning's celebrated judgments, about cricket balls. Nothing on earth was going to get Denning to stop people playing cricket. Miller v Jackson. Few write judgments in this style today.
Miserabilist is about right. It was an estimated ball every 2 days at the start, and the school then took measures such as a net over the pitch.
The buggers still took legal action over as I take it the earlier period. If you move in next to a school, expect games.
"We can no longer use our swimming pool." FFS. They are worth North of £20m.
At least the Judge only gave them nominal damages, and refused to issue a ban. It's time for the school to introduce outdoor band practice, and develop a Kazoo Parade Band like in Yank Land.
A big hedge would cost less than the Court Fees.
If the net isn’t stopping the balls, maybe they need a bigger and better net. 170 balls in 11 months is a bit much.
The couple sought legal advice and a letter was sent in 2022 to the school over the matter. Mitigations were then made, including the installation of a net over the top of the pitch to prevent balls going astray, which reduced the number of balls.
Succumbing to the temptation to look at the location in Google Earth, all I can say is that if the pupils can kick a ball over the trees on the boundary, there are some good future football or rugby players in Winchester.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Do you have a link to the document?
Anyhow it looks like pet passports are coming back, if with a wait, so Mr Dog is very happy.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Remember that I voted leave (I know, I know...) but I am delighted because I live the idiocy of the Boris/Sunak deal daily. Binning SPS - made especially idiotic when both sets of standards are the same - is common sense defeating dogmatic idiocy.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail (2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Do you have a link to the document?
Anyhow it looks like pet passports are coming back, if with a wait, so Mr Dog is very happy.
I hadn't appreciated they'd been removed tbh. So no taking dogs on hols to France etc. at the moment?
You still can, either by paying an official vet between £100 and £250 for new paperwork for every trip, or by doing what I did and finding a vet inside the EU who would issue a passport; hence my dog is officially Belgian. But he still won’t eat mussels.
1 stop all the boats and clear the hotels 2 get the Boriswave to go home 3 reduce migration to under 150k 4 clean up our streets, stop shoplifting, make our cities prettier again 5 make us all just a tiny bit richer
Special Brucie Bonus for untangling council tax, stamp duty and local government fiscal problems.
Doing the latter means implementing an annual % property tax. Would be far, far better economically, but the politics of it makes it really hard to do. You’re going to be putting up taxes on poor old people in their houses they’ve planned to retire in / die in, quite possibly forcing many of them out into smaller properties.
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
I accept that it is devilishly hard. But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
Presuming a property tax would replace council tax the people likely to be squealing hardest are people in London where property prices are eye watering. Remind me of where most politicians/civil servants/media people live again
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
Except if it's replacing council tax then it should be down to local authorities what percentage to charge.
That said, I don't see why someone in a million pound house shouldn't pay a lot more than someone in a £250k house. The very fact of that price difference means that they're not identical. Location matters.
By identical I obviously meant the amenities the house itself offers, such as number of bedrooms/bathrooms, size etc
Also I have to ask whats the point of bringing it a local property tax if it results basically in everyone still paying the same as they did under council tax? Its a waste of time and energy may as well just keep council tax
It wouldn't.
As you note, a £1m would pay four times the amount that a £250k house does. By contrast, at the moment a Band H house only pays three times as much as a Band A despite being a minimum of eight times the value in 1991 (since when the disparity has only grown).
On your earlier note, identical houses in terms of layout, facilities and quality have always varied wildly in price depending on where they are - and, consequently, who can afford to live in them. We can't simply ignore that part of the equation. A 3-bed semi in Ravenscliffe does not have the same desireability as a 3-bed semi in Alwoodley.
But if you made it local someone living in a million pound house in london would still be paying about the same as the 250k house in the north. If you were saying a million pound house in the same northern town was paying 4 times as much as someone in the 250k house in the the same town you would be correct.
A property tax is basically a wealth tax, it has to be national else you are telling people that some peoples wealth deserves less taxing than other peoples wealth.
Tory presser on: the trade deal "undermines the sovereignty of the British People" because apparently we just joined the EU or something.
Because it extends the poor deal Johnson did on fishing for more years! Good luck if Kemi is going to try and hang her hat on that!
A couple of people on Twitter desperately trying get around that problem. Apparently Boris "giving up fishing rights" was ok, but not when Starmer extends that deal. Purportedly once the Boris deal expired we would simply have been able to sail into Norwegian or Icelandic waters to catch what we liked whilst sinking their boats trying to fish in our waters.
There are concerning aspects of this deal where we - once again - come under the jurisdiction of the ECJ - in energy and agrifood, especially. We all know the ECJ does mission creep
However I am much less concerned than I might be. Why? Because Europe is swinging hard right. Meloni is in power in Italy, Le Pen is poised in France, the AfD are surging in Germany, the Danish Democrats are basically Franco, that brilliant Simioni guy nearly won in Romania, Orban is superb. Love the True Finns, go the Swedish Democrats (who are basically Pinochet plus Abba). This is a new alt.right Europe I can REALLY get behind, alongside @kinabalu
Europe has changed. This is my kind of Europe. If they keep moving to the right (and there is no sign they are stopping) I might campaign to REJOIN
The BBC commentary on this deal encapsulates one of the reasons the pro-European cause has had such a poor run in recent years.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
The BBC seems to be turning into GB News with its negative slant . And Chris Mason is just parroting the betrayal narrative with his ridiculous question .
Yes, BBC R4 news summary at 2pm was: Starmer's done a deal with the EU. Some fishermen are unhappy. Farage and Badenoch are unhappy. Then Lord Frost featured, being scathing. That was it. Utterly unbalanced.
I'm a Leaver and abhor this craven, useless government , yet I am essentially content with this deal. It is a sensible compromise between two powers that are bound to trade freely, and benefit from doing so
On the face of it, it is not the capitulation I expected from Starmer and his team. They have won real positives in return for a surrender on fishing. Both sides stand to gain
So if they can persuade an enemy like me that this is Not Bad, even Quite Good, then they should be able to persuade Britain. This is on the Labour comms team. Can they do it?
Ultimately this will help in the real world, and a non-insignificant proportion of the public will notice before 2028/9: - People don't like queueing at the "slow lane" at airports. Let's assume it's not ready by this summer, but people will notice in the next couple of years. - Both parents and young people will like the youth mobility scheme. - The food deal means we can export more to Europe again: real world benefit with little cost given our standard are already aligned - ...fishing "sell out" keeps the status quo except our fishermen can now export back into Europe much more easily (so a net improvement even there) - Defence and security pact important given Russia/Ukraine/Trump dynamic, and will benefit our defence companies down the line
Think back to Brexit negotiations: there was much talk of "the four freedoms are indivisible". Well, Starmer has just carved out being (essentially) part of the single market for food, fish, energy and defence, while not conceding on freedom of movement where it matters.
Clearly there's lots of detail to be ironed out, but it's a step in the right direction.
There are concerning aspects of this deal where we - once again - come under the jurisdiction of the ECJ - in energy and agrifood, especially. We all know the ECJ does mission creep
However I am much less concerned than I might be. Why? Because Europe is swinging hard right. Meloni is in power in Italy, Le Pen is poised in France, the AfD are surging in Germany, the Danish Democrats are basically Franco, that brilliant Simioni guy nearly won in Romania, Orban is superb. Love the True Finns, go the Swedish Democrats (who are basically Pinochet plus Abba). This is a new alt.right Europe I can REALLY get behind, alongside @kinabalu
Europe has changed. This is my kind of Europe. If they keep moving to the right (and there is no sign they are stopping) I might campaign to REJOIN
Comments
Our dog used to be a PAT dog but stopped after covid as he'd switched to raw food on the vets advice and they refused to take him as he was clearly a H&S risk at that point (!)
The idea is a great one though.
Edit Just checked and tbf it's only £25 pa
But that apostrophe! What an outrage.
There are concerning aspects of this deal where we - once again - come under the jurisdiction of the ECJ - in energy and agrifood, especially. We all know the ECJ does mission creep
However I am much less concerned than I might be. Why? Because Europe is swinging hard right. Meloni is in power in Italy, Le Pen is poised in France, the AfD are surging in Germany, the Danish Democrats are basically Franco, that brilliant Simioni guy nearly won in Romania, Orban is superb. Love the True Finns, go the Swedish Democrats (who are basically Pinochet plus Abba). This is a new alt.right Europe I can REALLY get behind, alongside @kinabalu
Europe has changed. This is my kind of Europe. If they keep moving to the right (and there is no sign they are stopping) I might campaign to REJOIN
Hence it's not been easy to find Brexit freedoms really worth exploiting, because most of them are not that popular (take the massive US Trade Deal as an extreme example of that). And unpicking bits of the 2019 settlement that don't go near the red lines is likely to be popular.
Tricky one for the opposition. They can't endorse the government (especially when the government are saying, fairly loudly, that Johnson's deal was bad for the country), but opposing these measures makes them look more than a bit mad.
The dollar is sliding and US Treasury yields are rising in the wake of Friday's Moody's downgrade of US debt. My latest on why the path down Mount Stupid will remain long and bumpy and the rising risk of an American Liz Truss moment
https://x.com/Simon_Nixon/status/1924453031782805828
According to news reports, Beyoncé was paid $11,000,000 to walk onto a stage, quickly ENDORSE KAMALA, and walk off to loud booing for never having performed, NOT EVEN ONE SONG! Remember, the Democrats and Kamala illegally paid her millions of Dollars for doing nothing other than giving Kamala a full throated ENDORSEMENT. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! IT IS AN ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION! BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, OPRAH, BONO AND, PERHAPS, MANY OTHERS, HAVE A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO!!!
"Criminal records stolen in cyberattack on Legal Aid Agency
Sensitive personal information of online applicants, including financial details and addresses, downloaded by hackers" (£)
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/criminal-records-cyber-attack-legal-aid-xzpbw08s3
https://youtu.be/D2MbpcbQf9I?t=9
Just remember no one can negotiate like Johnson and Frost. No borders in the Irish Sea from them, no siree, it was just all copper bottomed awesomeness.
GB News : "Brexit is a good thing?"
Brexit Fisherman : "It's been a disaster"
"But exports?"
"Red tape is 100 fold, our main market is the EU"
"But EU fisherman?"
"They didn't come here"
"But charge more?"
"They can buy in the EU"
"How would you vote?"
"I'd vote for Remain in a heart beat"
https://bsky.app/profile/russellengland.bsky.social/post/3li2ihhmbr22l
Such a fat, useless, waster.
Tell us again about your immigration achievements, Boris.
Patriotic Alternative was founded by Mark Collett, who was previously the Publicity Director of the BNP.
And the Homeland Party splintered off Patriotic Alternative. They push things like the Great Replacement Theory.
I'd call both white supremacist and neo-fascist.
(Slightly unfair on early Rishi, I know. One year mostly competent, one year panic in his case?)
The key thing here is that Brexit happened - we left. All of this kerfuffle has been about the choices we made *after* we left. Nobody credible* is claiming that the existing deal works. So as the new deal makes trade easier and makes the economy better for ordinary people without giving away anything significant, why not back it?
The battlelines of the future about where we go as an independent nation state. The Tories seem obsessed with repeat fighting a battle they claim to have won. Farage could move soooooo far beyond them if he did as you suggest. Would be a tactical masterstroke.
*The Tories are not credible
This would be /great/ for the economy! Given how tight housing supply is we absolutely need to redistribute family homes from old couples bouncing around in them to younger families desperate for more space for their children. But making existing householders pay their fair share of tax, in proportion to property value would be a wide ranging disruption & the lowers, mostly older couples in larger houses who are the most likely population to vote, will scream louder than anyone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Treasury has suggested this policy to every incoming government for decades & promptly been slapped down by a PM who can see exactly what it means electorally. Until we get a population that understands the need for reform it will never happen & I don’t see how we can get there - turkeys don’t vote for Christmas & retired homeowners are not going to vote for a party that doubles their taxes, no matter how economically appropriate that is.
@atrupar.com
Leavitt: "The reality is, as the president has always maintained, the Chinese producers will be absorbing the cost of these tariffs."
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lpjpa7pi3d2t
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx2jkz3d0drt
I'm sticking my neck out here and guessing that's 'gobsmacked', but not in a good way.
Opening sentence: “this is undoubtedly a significant deal. In a funny way, though, for Sir Keir Starmer to succeed he needs it to seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as
possible”.
I couldn’t disagree more. This has been the repeated failing of politicians on Europe. They fear the Eurosceptics and the Daily Mail, so they play down the positives and understate everything. Which means voters don’t notice or appreciate the good stuff while the silence then leaves the floor for the Mail et al to paint their own pictures. And the understatement just makes them look shifty.
Shout it from the rooftops for once. Take control of the narrative. Does Trump try to make all his new measures seem as insignificant and uncontroversial as possible? No.
But we need a pathway there.
There’s a housing theory of everything, and a “local authorities have no tax base and are forced by statutory requirement to bankrupt themselves on care services” theory of everything.
Unlock those, and almost anything becomes possible.
I would start by figuring out how local authorities can create decent amounts of debt for housing and transport expenditure without disturbing the gilt market.
I would move on to how to compensate current homeowners in the shorter-term for sustainable changes in the longer term. (A similar logic applies to the triple lock).
And even then, he/they debauched themselves with an unaffordable reduction in national insurance premised on savage future cuts to public services which they knew were not deliverable. Essentially, it was a giveaway designed purely to minimise Tory losses.
Rishi was merely better than Johnson and Truss.
Fruit and veg are fine - they can be good, and rubbish.
There is stuff in fish that we can't easily get elsewhere though, and history tells us that we used to eat a whole lot more of it than we do now.
In no way does this comment from the BBC provide useful, predicative, or critical insight. It’s speculation from inside a weird mental trap.
If it’s all just sell out and surrender, he’s retreated to his usual protest politics.
I suspect he’ll go with the latter, but we’ll see.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/14/liz-truss-appoints-jeremy-hunt-as-chancellor-after-sacking-kwarteng
Liz Truss appoints Jeremy Hunt as chancellor after sacking Kwarteng
Balance negativity for the Government with positivity for Farage/Johnson.
Take two homes identical except one is in the north and one in london currently both pay about 1800 a year council tax
The london house is worth a million the northern house is worth 250k
Say the property tax is 0.5%
The londoner is now paying 5000 a year
The northerner is happy their tax is down to 1250
And yet they continually arse lick Farage .
One thing the government should absolutely have committed to in the first budget was a full re-banding exercise for Council Tax, with full implementation of periodic re-banding. That was the time to do it, unfortunately it feels like the opportunity has been lost.
And I own two properties in London.
Oh wait... what about a local property tax?
But their job first and foremost is to explain and educate the audience in as unbiased manner as possible.
In part that does indeed providing Farage a platform, but it also implies subjecting his claims to scrutiny from both political opponents and policy experts.
(1) Most of it reads like a memorandum of understanding, for the UK and EU to cooperate in a far more practical way than before - but it's pretty thin on detail
(2) On SPS it looks like effectively we rejoin the common market on food, plants, animals and fish- and we get consulted on the rules early in the process (aka EFTA-EEA style)
I'd say politically it will be accepted by the bulk of the population, and Remainers will absolutely orgasm over it (as some are on here today) so it's probably a shrewd balance by Starmer.
Otherwise a property tax makes no sense if its not taxing those who's house prices have risen the most more than someone who's house hasn't risen by nearly as much
Anyhow it looks like pet passports are coming back, if with a wait, so Mr Dog is very happy.
That said, I don't see why someone in a million pound house shouldn't pay a lot more than someone in a £250k house. The very fact of that price difference means that they're not identical. Location matters.
If Britain has a decent deal with the EU, that largely satisfies both sides, why on earth would any UK government expend all of its political capital to get and win a referendum on Proper Rejoin? A referendum they would be extremely likely to lose, due to the enormous risks on both sides (a possible veto, are we in the euro, Free Movement, huge new instability, and so on)
No UK government will ever call that plebiscite. So we are now forever cemented into a position akin to Switzerland or Norway, where both sides give and take in negotiations, the smaller countries yielding some powers in return for the freedom of not being in the EU's political structures
This deal means we will never Rejoin (that was the case anyway, but this nails down the coffin lid, for sure)
It's time to declare war on Spain.
That Farage's lot are leading the polls in Britain was news to my in-laws.
The change in the phytosanitary rules should make life a lot easier for the NI border situation. At least until Farage takes over and Britain wastes yet more years obsessing over its relationship with Europe to the detriment of all concerned.
On the face of it, it is not the capitulation I expected from Starmer and his team. They have won real positives in return for a surrender on fishing. Both sides stand to gain
So if they can persuade an enemy like me that this is Not Bad, even Quite Good, then they should be able to persuade Britain. This is on the Labour comms team. Can they do it?
As you note, a £1m would pay four times the amount that a £250k house does. By contrast, at the moment a Band H house only pays three times as much as a Band A despite being a minimum of eight times the value in 1991 (since when the disparity has only grown).
On your earlier note, identical houses in terms of layout, facilities and quality have always varied wildly in price depending on where they are - and, consequently, who can afford to live in them. We can't simply ignore that part of the equation. A 3-bed semi in Ravenscliffe does not have the same desireability as a 3-bed semi in Alwoodley.
A property tax is basically a wealth tax, it has to be national else you are telling people that some peoples wealth deserves less taxing than other peoples wealth.
- People don't like queueing at the "slow lane" at airports. Let's assume it's not ready by this summer, but people will notice in the next couple of years.
- Both parents and young people will like the youth mobility scheme.
- The food deal means we can export more to Europe again: real world benefit with little cost given our standard are already aligned
- ...fishing "sell out" keeps the status quo except our fishermen can now export back into Europe much more easily (so a net improvement even there)
- Defence and security pact important given Russia/Ukraine/Trump dynamic, and will benefit our defence companies down the line
Think back to Brexit negotiations: there was much talk of "the four freedoms are indivisible". Well, Starmer has just carved out being (essentially) part of the single market for food, fish, energy and defence, while not conceding on freedom of movement where it matters.
Clearly there's lots of detail to be ironed out, but it's a step in the right direction.