No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
Farage is positioning himself and Reform in a old fashioned centre left social democratic place + very closed borders. Details to follow but not to put into writing until 2028/9 in a manifesto; this will be centrist and also warn that Rome was not built in a day.
If he could add to this a competent front bench and 325+ potential MPs who aren't dim loonies + net Zero 'at the same pace as the rest of the world' he will win.
I disagree with the positioning. He's creating anti-New Labour. Back in the Third Way days Blair and Clinton pulled together a coalition of policies from across the political spectrum, a "what works" approach to policy built on a globalist internationalist framework.
Farage has kept the whatever works approach, but he's even more radical than Blair and Clinton. And his framework is anti-globalisation, to erect barriers and protect our own as if we can just tell the foreigners to do one and still have them buy our stuff.
When after 25 years of planning, we can't build a railway line from Acton (Old Oak Common) into Central London, good luck with a deep mine in every valley of South Wales by a week next Tuesday.
He's in Port Talbot you say? I'm twenty miles away by and I can smell the bullshit.
Farage makes it sound like rocking up to the old pit entrance and removing the crossed bits of balsa wood blocking it off and sending some baritone singing taffies down there with lamps on their helmets
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
Trump's federalising of the California National Guard. As I understand it the decree now allows him to federalise ANY guard as he sees fit to deploy against their own state.
Pretty quickly you're going to get the national guard stuck in the middle - refusing federal orders to attack their own people.
Are illegal immigrants waving Mexican flags "their own people"?
You think that is all that is happening?
This is the problem with America. It has legalised undocumented migration. People have been here for decades in some cases, paying taxes, having kids, becoming part of the community. You think their friends and neighbours are cheering on the ICE raids? Or protesting?
"Don't worry, we're only sending the abduction squads after the bad people, you have nothing to fear" is an odd line for the right to take. Especially a right who has such a pathological fear of the government coming after them that they insist on their God-Given rights to carry an AR15 to Walmart to defend themselves against said Government agents.
Trump's federalising of the California National Guard. As I understand it the decree now allows him to federalise ANY guard as he sees fit to deploy against their own state.
Pretty quickly you're going to get the national guard stuck in the middle - refusing federal orders to attack their own people.
Are illegal immigrants waving Mexican flags "their own people"?
You think that is all that is happening?
This is the problem with America. It has legalised undocumented migration. People have been here for decades in some cases, paying taxes, having kids, becoming part of the community. You think their friends and neighbours are cheering on the ICE raids? Or protesting?
"Don't worry, we're only sending the abduction squads after the bad people, you have nothing to fear" is an odd line for the right to take. Especially a right who has such a pathological fear of the government coming after them that they insist on their God-Given rights to carry an AR15 to Walmart to defend themselves against said Government agents.
How and why did it legalise undocumented migration.
This is impressive. Neville Brown started working as teacher in 1958 and still going at the age of 90.
"The dyslexia school run by a 90-year-old where pupils nail GCSEs Forget phonics and use a fountain pen: these are some of the secrets to earning at least seven pass grades when you struggle with reading or writing
At Maple Hayes Hall, a school for dyslexic children, prospective pupils attend an assessment with its founder, Neville Brown. By the end of the meeting, most of the children — many of whom arrive here in the Staffordshire countryside aged nine or older unable to read or write — can comfortably spell the word “television”. For parents, it is akin to a magic trick. They are in the hands of a professional with an extraordinary amount of experience. Brown, 90, became an English teacher in 1958 and for 40 years has been working with dyslexic pupils using the same innovative method he pioneered in the 1970s while studying for a PhD in psycholinguistics." (£)
Trump's federalising of the California National Guard. As I understand it the decree now allows him to federalise ANY guard as he sees fit to deploy against their own state.
Pretty quickly you're going to get the national guard stuck in the middle - refusing federal orders to attack their own people.
Are illegal immigrants waving Mexican flags "their own people"?
You think that is all that is happening?
This is the problem with America. It has legalised undocumented migration. People have been here for decades in some cases, paying taxes, having kids, becoming part of the community. You think their friends and neighbours are cheering on the ICE raids? Or protesting?
"Don't worry, we're only sending the abduction squads after the bad people, you have nothing to fear" is an odd line for the right to take. Especially a right who has such a pathological fear of the government coming after them that they insist on their God-Given rights to carry an AR15 to Walmart to defend themselves against said Government agents.
Given their targeting of the law abiding who turn up for their immigration hearings, that's a blatant lie.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
My government has fixed the foundations of our economy. We now have the highest growth in the G7, four interest rate cuts, and we have signed three trade deals to protect jobs and put more money in your pockets.
The economy is improving, and I want you to feel that in your day-to-day lives – that is why we are expanding eligibility for the winter fuel allowance.
They'd have been better off saying they made a mistake. This line that suddenly the economy is booming so they can reinstate it is palpably b*llocks, and makes them look shifty.
It's an interesting tack. They were accused of being too doom and gloom when they came in. I think it's certainly crucial that they are able to show ordinary people how they are benefitting from a growing economy.
My government has fixed the foundations of our economy. We now have the highest growth in the G7, four interest rate cuts, and we have signed three trade deals to protect jobs and put more money in your pockets.
The economy is improving, and I want you to feel that in your day-to-day lives – that is why we are expanding eligibility for the winter fuel allowance.
They'd have been better off saying they made a mistake. This line that suddenly the economy is booming so they can reinstate it is palpably b*llocks, and makes them look shifty.
It's an interesting tack. They were accused of being too doom and gloom when they came in. I think it's certainly crucial that they are able to show ordinary people how they are benefitting from a growing economy.
That's fine, if the economy is growing and the public finances consequently benefiting.
They've created a massive problem for themselves if they haven't fixed all the problems in less than a year, though.
My government has fixed the foundations of our economy. We now have the highest growth in the G7, four interest rate cuts, and we have signed three trade deals to protect jobs and put more money in your pockets.
The economy is improving, and I want you to feel that in your day-to-day lives – that is why we are expanding eligibility for the winter fuel allowance.
They'd have been better off saying they made a mistake. This line that suddenly the economy is booming so they can reinstate it is palpably b*llocks, and makes them look shifty.
It's an interesting tack. They were accused of being too doom and gloom when they came in. I think it's certainly crucial that they are able to show ordinary people how they are benefitting from a growing economy.
That's fine, if the economy is growing and the public finances consequently benefiting.
They've created a massive problem for themselves if they haven't fixed all the problems in less than a year, though.
They've created a massive problem for themselves that they've shown they've got no spine whatsoever.
Trump's federalising of the California National Guard. As I understand it the decree now allows him to federalise ANY guard as he sees fit to deploy against their own state.
Pretty quickly you're going to get the national guard stuck in the middle - refusing federal orders to attack their own people.
Are illegal immigrants waving Mexican flags "their own people"?
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
There used to be a Trade Union movement within the Conservative Party didn't there?
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Minimum wage is about double the state pension now for full time workers and of course those with children get child benefit pensioners don't get too.
Most on just state pension will be renting
You throw out comments
Please show your source for most pensioners are renting
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Minimum wage is about double the state pension now for full time workers and of course those with children get child benefit pensioners don't get too.
Most on just state pension will be renting
Had a look at the stats on this. If you are on SRP and are renting, you are likely to receive Housing Benefit. Housing Element is for those of working age. So numbers for Nov 2023 are:
Private Rented and HB : 480,000 Social Rented and HB: 1,840,000 Total number of Pensioners: 12.95 mn
So 82% of pensioners are in their own home but not receiving HB i.e. paid off, mortgaged or rich renters. I'd suggest that Bart's figure of 75% in their own home is close to the mark.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Minimum wage is about double the state pension now for full time workers and of course those with children get child benefit pensioners don't get too.
Most on just state pension will be renting
Had a look at the stats on this. If you are on SRP and are renting, you are likely to receive Housing Benefit. Housing Element is for those of working age. So numbers for Nov 2023 are:
Private Rented and HB : 480,000 Social Rented and HB: 1,840,000 Total number of Pensioners: 12.95 mn
So 82% of pensioners are in their own home but not receiving HB i.e. paid off, mortgaged or rich renters. I'd suggest that Bart's figure of 75% in their own home is close to the mark.
You get housing benefit if you are renting and on minimum wage, which is double the state pension income now, plus child benefit if you have children which those on state pension won't get either
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
"My first job was programming Binary Loadlifters, very similar to your Moisture Vaporators in most respects."
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Minimum wage is about double the state pension now for full time workers and of course those with children get child benefit pensioners don't get too.
Most on just state pension will be renting
Had a look at the stats on this. If you are on SRP and are renting, you are likely to receive Housing Benefit. Housing Element is for those of working age. So numbers for Nov 2023 are:
Private Rented and HB : 480,000 Social Rented and HB: 1,840,000 Total number of Pensioners: 12.95 mn
So 82% of pensioners are in their own home but not receiving HB i.e. paid off, mortgaged or rich renters. I'd suggest that Bart's figure of 75% in their own home is close to the mark.
You get housing benefit if you are renting and on minimum wage, which is double the state pension income now, plus child benefit if you have children which those on state pension won't get either
If you don't get child benefit, its because you don't need to pay for children, and children cost far more than child benefit.
Pensioners who are paying for children are entitled to child benefit.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
There used to be a Trade Union movement within the Conservative Party didn't there?
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
You are talking rubbish.
Smaller mines were superceded by supermines. The economies of scale closed small uneconomic mines and the workers were redeployed to big mines. Fatch closed the big mines and all the jobs that went with them. Anyway if you want to put on your helmet and take your Davey lamp and canary to a seam hundreds of feet underground, good luck to you.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
The facts were that coal was getting more and more expensive to mine in the U.K. it had been doing so for generations.
At the same time world coal prices were collapsing (due to vast, open cast pits) and gas was coming on line.
Scargill literally wanted an eternal subsidy to support mining no matter what. Thatcher saying no to that was about the fourth no from various governments.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
There were Conservative Trade Unionists, even one MP, but generally they were rare birds. I had a few run-ins with management after I qualified; I tried to keep my nose clean before. Getting into a dispute with the Area Manager could have had disastrous consequences.
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Minimum wage is about double the state pension now for full time workers and of course those with children get child benefit pensioners don't get too.
Most on just state pension will be renting
You throw out comments
Please show your source for most pensioners are renting
My government has fixed the foundations of our economy. We now have the highest growth in the G7, four interest rate cuts, and we have signed three trade deals to protect jobs and put more money in your pockets.
The economy is improving, and I want you to feel that in your day-to-day lives – that is why we are expanding eligibility for the winter fuel allowance.
*bleak, hollow laughter, resounding down the vaulted halls of mockery, until the crack of Doom*
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
There were Conservative Trade Unionists, even one MP, but generally they were rare birds. I had a few run-ins with management after I qualified; I tried to keep my nose clean before. Getting into a dispute with the Area Manager could have had disastrous consequences.
Unfortunately, the most prominent Conservative trade unionist, Ray Mawby, also spied for the Czechs.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
It can, but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book. Although having strong unions no doubt contributes to that.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
Smaller mines were superceded by Supermines. The economies of scale closed small uneconomic mines and the workers were redeployed to big mines. Fatch closed the big mines and all the jobs that went with them. Anyway if you want to put on your helmet and take your Davey lamp and canary to a seam hundreds of feet underground, good luck to you.
Big mines were closing before 'Fatcha'. People who ignore what was happening to coal mining before and after her time as PM really do their arguments no favours. See those charts I posted earlier: even production was falling precipitously.
IMV what did happen in the 1980s was that consolidation reached braking point. As mines closed, those who wanted to remain in mining had the option to move to other collieries in their local area. But when there were only two or three - or even none - in an area, that became much more difficult, if not impossible. And as mining was a fairly well-paid job, and often involved poorly-transferrable skills, that meant a reduction in pay - and a disaster for the local area.
But that wasn't particularly Thatcher's fault - it was just the she was there at that point. And the NUM also deserve massive blame in what happened.
Oddly enough, I see little opprobrium towards Blair over the many mines that closed between 1997 and 2010.
Underground coal gasification allows the coal to be recovered without the need to mine it. You can reach out to the coal that is miles out from the Durham Coast under the North Sea.
Get the syngas to the surface, water gas shift, Rectisol to remove the H2S (which is then sent to a Claus plant) and CO2, compress the CO2 for sequestration and use the hydrogen product for power generation, heating or as chemical feedstock. Brilliant, eh?
However, as with fracking and new offshore exploration licences, UCG has been blocked in the UK.
What does this country have against indigenous energy resources?
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
Farage is positioning himself and Reform in a old fashioned centre left social democratic place + very closed borders. Details to follow but not to put into writing until 2028/9 in a manifesto; this will be centrist and also warn that Rome was not built in a day.
If he could add to this a competent front bench and 325+ potential MPs who aren't dim loonies + net Zero 'at the same pace as the rest of the world' he will win.
Reform UK may support some traditional social democratic policies, but I think your overstate their positioning. They remain hostile to liberal social policies that are typically supported by social democrats. They aren't talking about higher taxes or more redistributive taxes either.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
Trump's federalising of the California National Guard. As I understand it the decree now allows him to federalise ANY guard as he sees fit to deploy against their own state.
Pretty quickly you're going to get the national guard stuck in the middle - refusing federal orders to attack their own people.
Are illegal immigrants waving Mexican flags "their own people"?
You think that is all that is happening?
This is the problem with America. It has legalised undocumented migration. People have been here for decades in some cases, paying taxes, having kids, becoming part of the community. You think their friends and neighbours are cheering on the ICE raids? Or protesting?
"Don't worry, we're only sending the abduction squads after the bad people, you have nothing to fear" is an odd line for the right to take. Especially a right who has such a pathological fear of the government coming after them that they insist on their God-Given rights to carry an AR15 to Walmart to defend themselves against said Government agents.
How and why did it legalise undocumented migration.
I think it started when the first European colonists came to the continent as undocumented migrants and just continued from there.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
They can be re-opened. My point remains. It is not serving national security if the essential fuel is coming from overseas (Japan, I think?).
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
Smaller mines were superceded by Supermines. The economies of scale closed small uneconomic mines and the workers were redeployed to big mines. Fatch closed the big mines and all the jobs that went with them. Anyway if you want to put on your helmet and take your Davey lamp and canary to a seam hundreds of feet underground, good luck to you.
Big mines were closing before 'Fatcha'. People who ignore what was happening to coal mining before and after her time as PM really do their arguments no favours. See those charts I posted earlier: even production was falling precipitously.
IMV what did happen in the 1980s was that consolidation reached braking point. As mines closed, those who wanted to remain in mining had the option to move to other collieries in their local area. But when there were only two or three - or even none - in an area, that became much more difficult, if not impossible. And as mining was a fairly well-paid job, and often involved poorly-transferrable skills, that meant a reduction in pay - and a disaster for the local area.
But that wasn't particularly Thatcher's fault - it was just the she was there at that point. And the NUM also deserve massive blame in what happened.
Oddly enough, I see little opprobrium towards Blair over the many mines that closed between 1997 and 2010.
A couple of years back I went to the national mining museum on the way back from Sheffield.
There the guide pointed out that at the end the new machinery was mining so quickly it was no surprise the mines were fully used in a few years. As he said the additional machinery meant more money but everyone knew it meant the end was going to come in the next few years
Underground coal gasification allows the coal to be recovered without the need to mine it. You can reach out to the coal that is miles out from the Durham Coast under the North Sea.
Get the syngas to the surface, water gas shift, Rectisol to remove the H2S (which is then sent to a Claus plant) and CO2, compress the CO2 for sequestration and use the hydrogen product for power generation, heating or as chemical feedstock. Brilliant, eh?
However, as with fracking and new offshore exploration licences, UCG has been blocked in the UK.
What does this country have against indigenous energy resources?
There is one main reason. Those making the decisions are at it.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
Well if you're going to claim that I'm going to claim Thatcher was too then.
And I'll raise you. Thatcher's main reason for selling off council houses and all of her privatisations were partisan political. She trashed our housing system and flogged off our strategic industries just to try and create a cohort of tory voters.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
They can be re-opened. My point remains. It is not serving national security if the essential fuel is coming from overseas (Japan, I think?).
Pits can be reopened? Umm, no unless they are being carefully maintained while in limbo and we’ve never really done that as we don’t have the money.
Once closed a pit is very unlikely to be re-openable
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
They can be re-opened. My point remains. It is not serving national security if the essential fuel is coming from overseas (Japan, I think?).
Pits can be reopened? Umm, no unless they are being carefully maintained while in limbo and we’ve never really done that as we don’t have the money.
Once closed a pit is very unlikely to be re-openable
especially with a new housing estate or retail centre on the top.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
It can, but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book. Although having strong unions no doubt contributes to that.
“…but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book”
In scandal after scandal public sector organisations have trampled over “little people” - often stating that since they are a public organisation, their motives are pure by definition pure. And so their actions…
See the NHS hospital scandals, Hillsborough, Post Office and many, many more
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
I think a number of things are direct from SKS (such as WFA) but as she hasn’t resigned over it it does fall on her.
To say I’m unimpressed with this Government is a vast understatement
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
The facts were that coal was getting more and more expensive to mine in the U.K. it had been doing so for generations.
At the same time world coal prices were collapsing (due to vast, open cast pits) and gas was coming on line.
Scargill literally wanted an eternal subsidy to support mining no matter what. Thatcher saying no to that was about the fourth no from various governments.
Scargill did not want that. He wanted to bring down the government.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
It can, but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book. Although having strong unions no doubt contributes to that.
“…but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book”
In scandal after scandal public sector organisations have trampled over “little people” - often stating that since they are a public organisation, their motives are pure by definition pure. And so their actions…
See the NHS hospital scandals, Hillsborough, Post Office and many, many more
Private sector organisations just trample over 'little people' with less pretence to care?
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
They can be re-opened. My point remains. It is not serving national security if the essential fuel is coming from overseas (Japan, I think?).
Pits can be reopened? Umm, no unless they are being carefully maintained while in limbo and we’ve never really done that as we don’t have the money.
Once closed a pit is very unlikely to be re-openable
especially with a new housing estate or retail centre on the top.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
Well if you're going to claim that I'm going to claim Thatcher was too then.
And I'll raise you. Thatcher's main reason for selling off council houses and all of her privatisations were partisan political. She trashed our housing system and flogged off our strategic industries just to try and create a cohort of tory voters.
What do you say to that?
Yes and she greatly expanded working class home ownership as a result and made nationalised industries much more efficient
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
My government has fixed the foundations of our economy. We now have the highest growth in the G7, four interest rate cuts, and we have signed three trade deals to protect jobs and put more money in your pockets.
The economy is improving, and I want you to feel that in your day-to-day lives – that is why we are expanding eligibility for the winter fuel allowance.
I love that sort of bullshit because it works and the more they repeat the message the better it works. Think DFS and their wall to wall Easter sales
You really cannot see how awful this looks for Reeves can you?
No I don't. People want their 200 quids and they're grateful for it. Repentant sinners and all that........You watch the polls. i think you'll be surprised
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
It can, but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book. Although having strong unions no doubt contributes to that.
“…but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book”
In scandal after scandal public sector organisations have trampled over “little people” - often stating that since they are a public organisation, their motives are pure by definition pure. And so their actions…
See the NHS hospital scandals, Hillsborough, Post Office and many, many more
I don't think anybody is claiming otherwise. We were talking about them specifically as an employer, and relative to the private sector. Where is the greater risk of cowboy behaviour towards employees.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
They can be re-opened. My point remains. It is not serving national security if the essential fuel is coming from overseas (Japan, I think?).
Pits can be reopened? Umm, no unless they are being carefully maintained while in limbo and we’ve never really done that as we don’t have the money.
Once closed a pit is very unlikely to be re-openable
especially with a new housing estate or retail centre on the top.
Can you spot where Orgreave Colliery was?
Yes, but only because Mrs Flatlander surveyed it before it was developed.
Many old collieries are interesting sites with all sorts of wildlife and plants ("Open mosaic habitat on previously developed land").
Thanks to biodiversity net gain when such sites are developed there is supposed to be an equivalent habitat improved or created elsewhere. Unfortunately brown field sites are all being developed so there's no equivalent land available...
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
Farage is positioning himself and Reform in a old fashioned centre left social democratic place + very closed borders. Details to follow but not to put into writing until 2028/9 in a manifesto; this will be centrist and also warn that Rome was not built in a day.
If he could add to this a competent front bench and 325+ potential MPs who aren't dim loonies + net Zero 'at the same pace as the rest of the world' he will win.
Reform UK may support some traditional social democratic policies, but I think your overstate their positioning. They remain hostile to liberal social policies that are typically supported by social democrats. They aren't talking about higher taxes or more redistributive taxes either.
Possibly. Social democrat policies dominate the UK consensus. NHS, welfare state, NATO, free education to 18, pensions, high spend, high tax, regulated free market, global trade. Variations are tinkering at the edges.
As to social policies, I am not expecting the Reform manifesto in 2029 to: limit abortion, ban homosexuality, allow racial discrimination, limit divorce. I shall wait and see.
My basic position on Reform is this: to form a government, and 2029 will be the earliest possible try, they need a manifesto which gives the people of Clacton what they want. Try asking them!
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
Smarter people than us advising Starmer should have told him of the political risks. That they went ahead and were surprised is pretty damning of the people working with Downing Street.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
It can, but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book. Although having strong unions no doubt contributes to that.
“…but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book”
In scandal after scandal public sector organisations have trampled over “little people” - often stating that since they are a public organisation, their motives are pure by definition pure. And so their actions…
See the NHS hospital scandals, Hillsborough, Post Office and many, many more
I don't think anybody is claiming otherwise. We were talking about them specifically as an employer, and relative to the private sector. Where is the greater risk of cowboy behaviour towards employees.
Without supervision it seems to be the state, where a cowboy abusing their authority can get away with it.
In the private sector if someone is treated poorly they can go work for a competitor. In the state sector there normally isn't a competitor, so getting a bad reference from a cowboy can be a career death sentence.
Plenty of evidence for that, despite the fact that state employees are much more likely to be unionised.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
The illiteracy was Hezza shutting down profitable pits and then a whole generation of not caring if we make steel or not. When did industry become the holdout for the hard left btw - the capitalist right used to think it was a good idea as it made them rich.
Farage is asking the "what if" questions which millions have been asking for years and years. Sure, it's probably not doable. But he's talking about what we have lost thanks to cross-party vandalism and what we could have again if we took a strategic approach to where we are now and where we want to get to.
Do we want to make steel in the UK yes or no? If yes don't we have 400 years of coal sat underneath Wales waiting to be dug up to power the furnaces?
The pits weren't profitable. Which is why no-one could make them work - sadly, some miner invested their redundancy money in such schemes.
The perception was of a government maliciously targeting people they saw as hostile to their values.
I thought of Mrs Thatcher the other day when some PBers of a 'robust' right wing persuasion were complaining that this Labour government were doing things like VAT on private schools and IHT for farmers out of a desire to punish tory voters.
Ok, so making their school fees a bit more expensive or taking some tax when a chunk of land is passed on is not quite the same as complete loss of livelihood and dignity, but it's the same charge effectively.
Many family farms will be lost because of the family farms tax and of course more mines closed under Wilson than Thatcher
I actually don't agree with the charge either way. I think SKS is driven by what he thinks best for the country (whether I agree with it or not) and I accept the same was true of Mrs T. Ditto most PMs. About the only one I'd exempt from this assumption is Boris Johnson. I don't think he gave a shit.
No Starmer and Reeves were driven by class war pure and simple as most farmers don't vote Labour.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
Well if you're going to claim that I'm going to claim Thatcher was too then.
And I'll raise you. Thatcher's main reason for selling off council houses and all of her privatisations were partisan political. She trashed our housing system and flogged off our strategic industries just to try and create a cohort of tory voters.
What do you say to that?
Yes and she greatly expanded working class home ownership as a result and made nationalised industries much more efficient
Ahem. Thames Water...
And 40 years on, those homes are BTL by private landlords.
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
It's a view, and as I said I supported the cut. But they've done other unpopular things that have been castigated by many or most - private school fees, farmers' IHT, employers' NI, net zero, to name a few - and they haven't backtracked on those despite pressure to do so. I can live with one U-turn.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
Isn't that more good news for pensioners who generally own their own homes and like high interest rates?
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
No, the best way is for people to save for their own social care through some form of insurance. Taxes are highly distortionary and damaging to economic growth. Funding social care through private sector means on the other hand provides funds for investment (at any rate unless the government further rigs the capital markets to force such funds to invest in its debt) and teaches thrift and personal responsibility, values we as a society seem to have forgotten completely over the last generation.
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
I agree with a lot of this, but I think they set themselves up for this in the way they handled the issue from the get-go.
The issue was that this was one of the first decisions they made, independently of other tax-and-spend decisions. They would have been far better targeting universal benefits as part of a full package of announcements being made in the budget. This would have diluted the fallout somewhat, and allowed an "we're all in this together" narrative to be told, rather than looking like the government were singling out certain groups.
The whole thing was just incredibly mishandled and became a running sore as a result. Reeves should go, because I assume that this was all her smart and clever idea to try and look tough, but she's hamstrung the government 1 year into its tenure. She won't of course.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
No, the best way is for people to save for their own social care through some form of insurance. Taxation is highly distortionary and damaging to economic growth. Funding social care through private sector means on the other hand provides funds for investment and teaches thrift and personal responsibility, values we as a society seem to have completely forgotten over the last generation.
National Insurance was originally partly set up to fund healthcare and should be ringfenced to cover social care, state pensions and contributions based JSA.
You can still have private insurance for more expensive care homes if you wish
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
It's a view, and as I said I supported the cut. But they've done other unpopular things that have been castigated by many or most - private school fees, farmers' IHT, employers' NI, net zero, to name a few - and they haven't backtracked on those despite pressure to do so. I can live with one U-turn.
As private school parents, farmers and business owners never vote majority Labour while pensioners on low to average incomes sometimes do
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
The question of how it will be paid for has been pushed off until the autumn budget.
My guess is that they will extend the freeze in the tax allowances beyond 2028.
It's such an easy way of bringing in surprisingly large amounts of money, pushing up people's effective tax rates (especially those close to or already just in the higher rate band) without their really noticing. It also doesn't take anything from anyone (over and above what's already decided) until 2028 yet makes the government finances look significantly better for the years down the road.
It additionally provides perfect cover for also freezing the new £35,000 threshold for WFA - hence slowly, through time, inflation will push more people out of their WFA and Labour will eventually get to (or at least toward) what it originally proposed.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
A Labour government won't get reelected if they have to go begging to the IMF for a bailout to avoid an external default either. The rate at which RR is increasing the debt is already testing market patience and inflation is going up, not down. A spending review which adds yet more debt may precipitate a debt crisis and result in big upwards swings in debt yields forcing either swingeing cuts forced by the market or swingeing cuts forced by the IMF.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
IMF says hello
IMF doesn't have to win elections.
Otherwise you end up with an Italian style technocrat government for a while imposing austerity and tax rises which is ultimately still replaced by an elected populist cake for all party anyway
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
NI is a tax like any other, it is not hypothecated and hasn't been for almost 30 years.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
The only reason people are talking about opening coal mines is that the collective memory of how crap working in them was has disappeared.
So you have a rose tinted viewpoint from people who can’t remember what it was really like as those who worked down them have mainly died out from lung conditions
Because of my working class roots I was surrounded by miners growing up and was at the epicentre of the 1984/85 strike.
It’s funny when the South Yorkshire clubs play Nottingham Forest and Notts County they call them the scabs because the Nottinghamshire miners, even people born twenty years after the strike still do it because they have this romantic belief about mining and the strike.
My dad was crossing picket lines and my brother was on strike. Tense times in the house.
Blimey.
It put me off trade unions for life.
I don't, despite my leftish politics and working class roots in the area, have a romantic view of the strike. Arthur Scargill was bad news. He exploited the miners for his own extremist political ends. But emotionally it presented to me at the time as a black/white battle. People fighting courageously against the odds for their jobs and communities versus a remote and heartless authoritarian PM. So it wasn't hard to pick a side. I was sad when the miners were (inevitably) defeated.
In my first job after leaving college (Pharmacists have to do a years 'practical experience' before being let loose on the public) the chap I worked for was a rabid Tory. He was also a keen Trade Unionist, his rationale being that without a Union the individual employee had no protection if the employer decided to behave unfairly (this was the early 60's). He didn't like, or trust, the Area Manager, either.
No, Tories and unions weren't always enemies, were they. These days they seem to be much stronger in the public sector than the private sector. I kind of feel it ought to be the other way round. The UK government is never likely to appear on a list of worst employers.
Actually it certainly can do so.
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
It can, but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book. Although having strong unions no doubt contributes to that.
“…but on the whole you'd expect them to more play things by the book”
In scandal after scandal public sector organisations have trampled over “little people” - often stating that since they are a public organisation, their motives are pure by definition pure. And so their actions…
See the NHS hospital scandals, Hillsborough, Post Office and many, many more
I don't think anybody is claiming otherwise. We were talking about them specifically as an employer, and relative to the private sector. Where is the greater risk of cowboy behaviour towards employees.
The managers of private organisations would probably be more likely to rip off employees for gain.
The managers of public organisations would probably be more likely to resort to criminality, to protect reputations.
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
It will, as will the triple lock, and I note a labour think tank is suggesting some form of means testing for the state pension
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
It's a view, and as I said I supported the cut. But they've done other unpopular things that have been castigated by many or most - private school fees, farmers' IHT, employers' NI, net zero, to name a few - and they haven't backtracked on those despite pressure to do so. I can live with one U-turn.
I don't support the U-turn, I would like them to have kept it. But as you said upthread it is remarkable how toxic it was for them - I've heard plenty of reports that it was the number one issue on the doorstep in the local elections.
I suspect this is in large part a political mess that they couldn't have escaped - a relatively hostile commentariat would have found something else (you've listed several possible things) to castigate them with were it not WFP.
I suspect Labour hoped that, with time, it would have been seen as a relatively sensible cut that signaled a small step towards sound fiscal management. But this narrative clearly hasn't happened, and probably wouldn't have happened - instead it would have remained an albatross around their necks.
I can see the politics that says, after the locals, we can't afford to keep the WFP cut. But I don't like it. Perhaps the UK is simply ungovernable at the moment?
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
NI is a tax like any other, it is not hypothecated and hasn't been for almost 30 years.
Indeed, and it was always a tax even when it was hypothecated.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
A Labour government won't get reelected if they have to go begging to the IMF for a bailout to avoid an external default either. The rate at which RR is increasing the debt is already testing market patience and inflation is going up, not down. A spending review which adds yet more debt may precipitate a debt crisis and result in big upwards swings in debt yields forcing either swingeing cuts forced by the market or swingeing cuts forced by the IMF.
It will have more chance of re election getting a bailout than with massive austerity
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
No, the best way is for people to save for their own social care through some form of insurance. Taxes are highly distortionary and damaging to economic growth. Funding social care through private sector means on the other hand provides funds for investment (at any rate unless the government further rigs the capital markets to force such funds to invest in its debt) and teaches thrift and personal responsibility, values we as a society seem to have forgotten completely over the last generation.
That would ensure that people who have not been comfortably off in life spend their final years in misery and squalor.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
NI is a tax like any other, it is not hypothecated and hasn't been for almost 30 years.
Indeed, and it was always a tax even when it was hypothecated.
Nope, it was set up as an insurance to fund the state pension and contributory unemployment benefits and some healthcare only and should always have been ringfenced just for that
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Lower the 40% tax threshold for pensioners to £35,000.
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
It's a view, and as I said I supported the cut. But they've done other unpopular things that have been castigated by many or most - private school fees, farmers' IHT, employers' NI, net zero, to name a few - and they haven't backtracked on those despite pressure to do so. I can live with one U-turn.
I don't support the U-turn, I would like them to have kept it. But as you said upthread it is remarkable how toxic it was for them - I've heard plenty of reports that it was the number one issue on the doorstep in the local elections.
I suspect this is in large part a political mess that they couldn't have escaped - a relatively hostile commentariat would have found something else (you've listed several possible things) to castigate them with were it not WFP.
I suspect Labour hoped that, with time, it would have been seen as a relatively sensible cut that signaled a small step towards sound fiscal management. But this narrative clearly hasn't happened, and probably wouldn't have happened - instead it would have remained an albatross around their necks.
I can see the politics that says, after the locals, we can't afford to keep the WFP cut. But I don't like it. Perhaps the UK is simply ungovernable at the moment?
Of course it's governable ! For all our problems we're not somewhere like South Sudan..
£35,000 is surely a very high threshold for WFA. It's quite OK for working age people earning much less to freeze, then, especially those with infants and young children.
Indeed. Especially given that three quarters of pensioners own their own home without a mortgage or rent.
But parents with infants who earn less than that, while working, and have to pay rent too, don't get that support?
Ridiculous.
Minimum wage is about double the state pension now for full time workers and of course those with children get child benefit pensioners don't get too.
Most on just state pension will be renting
Had a look at the stats on this. If you are on SRP and are renting, you are likely to receive Housing Benefit. Housing Element is for those of working age. So numbers for Nov 2023 are:
Private Rented and HB : 480,000 Social Rented and HB: 1,840,000 Total number of Pensioners: 12.95 mn
So 82% of pensioners are in their own home but not receiving HB i.e. paid off, mortgaged or rich renters. I'd suggest that Bart's figure of 75% in their own home is close to the mark.
You get housing benefit if you are renting and on minimum wage, which is double the state pension income now, plus child benefit if you have children which those on state pension won't get either
You are incorrect. HB is paid by the local authority to those who qualify for Pension Credit i.e. income too low. Those of working age get Universal Credit and Housing Element (same as HB but from a different pocket). There are some pensioners on UC/HE but they will be mixed age couples.
Might I direct your to the Child Poverty Action Group/Shelter/DWP pages on this.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
Even Boris backed reopening a Cumbria coal mine, if Farage wants the South Wales white working class vote promising to reopen coal mines and sod upper middle class progressive net zero focused Londoners was the way to do it
You do talk nonsense
Coal mining will not happen here in Wales or anywhere else for that matter
No, the Cumbrian one will certainly happen. There's no point in keeping a blast furnace open because we need virgin steelmaking capacity if we need to import coal to run it.
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
The coke ovens at Scunthorpe have already closed. We don't have the capability to make coke, so it is now imported.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
They can be re-opened. My point remains. It is not serving national security if the essential fuel is coming from overseas (Japan, I think?).
Pits can be reopened? Umm, no unless they are being carefully maintained while in limbo and we’ve never really done that as we don’t have the money.
Once closed a pit is very unlikely to be re-openable
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
IMF says hello
IMF doesn't have to win elections.
Otherwise you end up with an Italian style technocrat government for a while imposing austerity and tax rises which is ultimately still replaced by an elected populist cake for all party anyway
Cake for all only works if there's someone funding the cake. Italy have made huge cuts to the state and a series of pro-growth measures to get market confidence back. Argentina is a more likely destination for the UK if the people continually vote themselves more spending, it's taken them 80 years, a few dictators and now a libertarian chainsaw wielding president to get back to some kind of credibility.
An external default event for the UK will be truly shocking and result in hundreds of billions being cut from state expenditure on welfare within months and windfall taxes on generous pension schemes as the government is forced to balance the books in order to rollover existing debt and sell new debt. We may even be forced to sell debt in dollars if confidence in Sterling is low.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
A similar debate happened in the US within the Republican Party, with Never-Trump fiscal conservatives arguing that Trumpism should be resisted because it was economically illiterate.
The Never Trumpers lost & I think the outcome will be the same in the UK.
The Conservative Party will be reduced to the same small minority as the Never-Trump Republicans, and Reform will be the majority "conservative" party.
Like Liz Truss I suspect Mr Farage will have to deal with the displeasure of the markets who will not want to fund this nonsense.
Bankers v coal miners argued by a populist rightwing party is exactly the type of contest Farage would relish
Farage is smart enough to know he can't take on Mr Market and win.
Trump has taken on the markets over tariffs and while he has lowered them he has kept his 10% tariffs on all imports with 25% for steel and more for China
So far. If Mr Market wants them lower, they will have to go lower.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
NI is a tax like any other, it is not hypothecated and hasn't been for almost 30 years.
Indeed, and it was always a tax even when it was hypothecated.
Nope, it was set up as an insurance to fund the state pension and contributory unemployment benefits and some healthcare only and should always have been ringfenced just for that
Nope, it was set up as a tax and called insurance.
It was always a tax, the name is irrelevant.
Using your logic we could merge NI and Income Tax as I advocate, keep the criterion for eligibility of the tax as Income Tax is set by today (so all income is covered equally not just wages), but call the revised tax "National Insurance" . . . then claim tax has been abolished.
No real Tory could ever countenance supporting such economic illiteracy.
He's going to reopen the blast furnaces using magic
Well what’s the point in us having a minister for magic and Hogwarts if we don’t use it?
Yes, when will he get away from this fanciful nonsense about 'energy costs' and 'making stuff' and get back to the pressing issues that people really care about like free chess boards and maths till 18?
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
Please quote the additional figure required from NI to fund social care and extending it to peoples homes
Have you even a clue about the cost even ?
And you do know anyway NI is not a hypothecated tax
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Income tax is a tax, as is inheritance tax (and people already have to sell their homes to pay for residential care).
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
NI is a tax like any other, it is not hypothecated and hasn't been for almost 30 years.
Indeed, and it was always a tax even when it was hypothecated.
Nope, it was set up as an insurance to fund the state pension and contributory unemployment benefits and some healthcare only and should always have been ringfenced just for that
Don't be silly - had that been the case, it would have been a generation before anyone could get a full state pension. Whereas in reality the state pension started straight away, funded from the current contributions of those working, like a Ponzi scheme.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
No Labour government will get re elected slashing pensions and welfare, even Reform are promising to protect both with a bit of DOGE from the latter locally.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
A Labour government won't get reelected if they have to go begging to the IMF for a bailout to avoid an external default either. The rate at which RR is increasing the debt is already testing market patience and inflation is going up, not down. A spending review which adds yet more debt may precipitate a debt crisis and result in big upwards swings in debt yields forcing either swingeing cuts forced by the market or swingeing cuts forced by the IMF.
It will have more chance of re election getting a bailout than with massive austerity
But what do you think a bailout would result in? The IMF aren't just going to hand over a £200bn loan to the UK for nothing in return. They will insist on Greek style austerity and massive cuts to the welfare state.
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
It's a view, and as I said I supported the cut. But they've done other unpopular things that have been castigated by many or most - private school fees, farmers' IHT, employers' NI, net zero, to name a few - and they haven't backtracked on those despite pressure to do so. I can live with one U-turn.
And ... CHAGOS!
Don't know about the "doorstep" but that got a right old pasting on here and in the papers.
On topic, I was surprised how toxic the original WFA cut proved to be - it's a relatively small hit to pensioners' incomes, especially given how much the state pension has risen over the last two years, and the poorest were protected. Personally, I'd have ridden it out. However, electorally toxic it was, and the U-turn, although politically embarrassing, is politically astute. The backlash should be fairly short-lived, and I don't think it will now be an issue at the next GE.
I think its disastrous.
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
It's a view, and as I said I supported the cut. But they've done other unpopular things that have been castigated by many or most - private school fees, farmers' IHT, employers' NI, net zero, to name a few - and they haven't backtracked on those despite pressure to do so. I can live with one U-turn.
I don't support the U-turn, I would like them to have kept it. But as you said upthread it is remarkable how toxic it was for them - I've heard plenty of reports that it was the number one issue on the doorstep in the local elections.
I suspect this is in large part a political mess that they couldn't have escaped - a relatively hostile commentariat would have found something else (you've listed several possible things) to castigate them with were it not WFP.
I suspect Labour hoped that, with time, it would have been seen as a relatively sensible cut that signaled a small step towards sound fiscal management. But this narrative clearly hasn't happened, and probably wouldn't have happened - instead it would have remained an albatross around their necks.
I can see the politics that says, after the locals, we can't afford to keep the WFP cut. But I don't like it. Perhaps the UK is simply ungovernable at the moment?
Of course it's governable ! For all our problems we're not somewhere like South Sudan..
Yeah alright, that was a bit melodramatic. I mean, perhaps it's not currently possible to present a coherent plan to the electorate that can both: get you re-elected; and pull us out of this economic hole we find ourselves in.
Time to sack Reeves. She's dangerously incompetent.
Hey Labour have only wasted the most important year of this Government - the one where the grotty things you have to do are 95% forgotten by the time the next election comes round
This spending review is going to send interest rates shooting up and mortgage rates will follow. She's Liz Truss in slow motion. The country can't afford to borrow more and it can't afford higher tax rates. Spending has got to fall and it has to fall on the unproductive bits like pensions and welfare.
She's worse than Liz Truss.
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
That NI supplement was the best way to fund social care longer term
Far from it.
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
The ni was a short term fix before the social care was moved to a different tax that everyone including pensioners were due to pay.
Now granted it should have been a direct increase in income tax but politics was involved so it had to be something else
Comments
Whether any other mines re-open or open is another issue.
This is the problem with America. It has legalised undocumented migration. People have been here for decades in some cases, paying taxes, having kids, becoming part of the community. You think their friends and neighbours are cheering on the ICE raids? Or protesting?
"Don't worry, we're only sending the abduction squads after the bad people, you have nothing to fear" is an odd line for the right to take. Especially a right who has such a pathological fear of the government coming after them that they insist on their God-Given rights to carry an AR15 to Walmart to defend themselves against said Government agents.
Trying to teach them using it is akin to mental torture.
I think it's certainly crucial that they are able to show ordinary people how they are benefitting from a growing economy.
They've created a massive problem for themselves if they haven't fixed all the problems in less than a year, though.
Instead, she has found another bandwagon offering an opportunity for self promotion and virtue signalling.
And anyone who thinks they were motivated by bringing aid to the needy is soft in the head. The prerecorded videos are a bit of a giveaway.
Private Rented and HB : 480,000
Social Rented and HB: 1,840,000
Total number of Pensioners: 12.95 mn
So 82% of pensioners are in their own home but not receiving HB i.e. paid off, mortgaged or rich renters. I'd suggest that Bart's figure of 75% in their own home is close to the mark.
Mrs Thatcher fought the unions yes but as I said more mines closed under Wilson than her
The public sector can be far more capricious as an individual who is dodgy in the public sector and abusing their power might not be held to account in the same way as in the private sector, without safeguards.
Indeed from here we seem to hear as many stories of capriciousness and bad employment in the public sector as the private.
Pensioners who are paying for children are entitled to child benefit.
Coking coal from Cumbria would need to be exported. But that in itself doesn't make the mine a bad idea. Balance of payments, local jobs, all that jazz.
https://www.youtube.com/@noelphilips/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QGTaGwxxc
Smaller mines were superceded by supermines. The economies of scale closed small uneconomic mines and the workers were redeployed to big mines. Fatch closed the big mines and all the jobs that went with them. Anyway if you want to put on your helmet and take your Davey lamp and canary to a seam hundreds of feet underground, good luck to you.
At the same time world coal prices were collapsing (due to vast, open cast pits) and gas was coming on line.
Scargill literally wanted an eternal subsidy to support mining no matter what. Thatcher saying no to that was about the fourth no from various governments.
IMV what did happen in the 1980s was that consolidation reached braking point. As mines closed, those who wanted to remain in mining had the option to move to other collieries in their local area. But when there were only two or three - or even none - in an area, that became much more difficult, if not impossible. And as mining was a fairly well-paid job, and often involved poorly-transferrable skills, that meant a reduction in pay - and a disaster for the local area.
But that wasn't particularly Thatcher's fault - it was just the she was there at that point. And the NUM also deserve massive blame in what happened.
Oddly enough, I see little opprobrium towards Blair over the many mines that closed between 1997 and 2010.
Get the syngas to the surface, water gas shift, Rectisol to remove the H2S (which is then sent to a Claus plant) and CO2, compress the CO2 for sequestration and use the hydrogen product for power generation, heating or as chemical feedstock. Brilliant, eh?
However, as with fracking and new offshore exploration licences, UCG has been blocked in the UK.
What does this country have against indigenous energy resources?
There the guide pointed out that at the end the new machinery was mining so quickly it was no surprise the mines were fully used in a few years. As he said the additional machinery meant more money but everyone knew it meant the end was going to come in the next few years
And I'll raise you. Thatcher's main reason for selling off council houses and all of her privatisations were partisan political. She trashed our housing system and flogged off our strategic industries just to try and create a cohort of tory voters.
What do you say to that?
Once closed a pit is very unlikely to be re-openable
In scandal after scandal public sector organisations have trampled over “little people” - often stating that since they are a public organisation, their motives are pure by definition pure. And so their actions…
See the NHS hospital scandals, Hillsborough, Post Office and many, many more
To say I’m unimpressed with this Government is a vast understatement
Liz Truss was incompetent but also unfortunate/foolish to coincide her rather trivial reforms with the Bank announcing QT, and her own announcement of the blank cheque on energy bill support.
Had they not announced the tax reforms (besides the pre-announced abolition of the dodgy NI supplement, which Hunt rightly kept abolished) but still had the QT and energy support, then the likelihood is that the markets would still have reacted, but the media would have comprehended the energy/QT effect without any scapegoats.
At least Truss had some sensible ideas like abolishing that hateful NI supplement that Sunak had created. What has Reeves ever done that's positive? Besides what she's now u-turned on.
The Tories might have got away with it if they were still strong with the private sector average earners but they aren't.
If the Tories remain in 3rd place and the LDs in 4th then cake for all from Labour and Reform (with a few tax rises for Tory voters from the former) will be the way forward for the next decade if not beyond
This was a sensible reform they did, one I repeatedly defended.
Now they've gone back on it, its the worst of all worlds.
They've taken the hit on the reform, yet not kept the economic advantages - and worse, politically, they've shown themselves to be spineless and willing to cave to any pressure even if they're doing the right thing.
Expect the moaning from anyone hit by any comparable reform now to be turned up to 11 as they've shown that's what gets results.
Utterly pathetic and no way to run a country. And weak, weak, weak from a government just elected by a landslide to u-turn on their first "difficult decision".
Why should only salaried incomes be paying for social care?
Income tax would be a better way to pay for it, 'all in it together'.
Or if you want payments for social care to protect people's inheritances, then do that from inheritance tax.
No reason to only tax people working for a living.
Many old collieries are interesting sites with all sorts of wildlife and plants ("Open mosaic habitat on previously developed land").
Thanks to biodiversity net gain when such sites are developed there is supposed to be an equivalent habitat improved or created elsewhere. Unfortunately brown field sites are all being developed so there's no equivalent land available...
Forward thinking by DEFRA as usual.
As to social policies, I am not expecting the Reform manifesto in 2029 to: limit abortion, ban homosexuality, allow racial discrimination, limit divorce. I shall wait and see.
My basic position on Reform is this: to form a government, and 2029 will be the earliest possible try, they need a manifesto which gives the people of Clacton what they want. Try asking them!
In the private sector if someone is treated poorly they can go work for a competitor. In the state sector there normally isn't a competitor, so getting a bad reference from a cowboy can be a career death sentence.
Plenty of evidence for that, despite the fact that state employees are much more likely to be unionised.
And 40 years on, those homes are BTL by private landlords.
I can live with one U-turn.
The issue was that this was one of the first decisions they made, independently of other tax-and-spend decisions. They would have been far better targeting universal benefits as part of a full package of announcements being made in the budget. This would have diluted the fallout somewhat, and allowed an "we're all in this together" narrative to be told, rather than looking like the government were singling out certain groups.
The whole thing was just incredibly mishandled and became a running sore as a result. Reeves should go, because I assume that this was all her smart and clever idea to try and look tough, but she's hamstrung the government 1 year into its tenure. She won't of course.
You can still have private insurance for more expensive care homes if you wish
My guess is that they will extend the freeze in the tax allowances beyond 2028.
It's such an easy way of bringing in surprisingly large amounts of money, pushing up people's effective tax rates (especially those close to or already just in the higher rate band) without their really noticing. It also doesn't take anything from anyone (over and above what's already decided) until
2028 yet makes the government finances look significantly better for the years down the road.
It additionally provides perfect cover for also freezing the new £35,000 threshold for WFA - hence slowly, through time, inflation will push more people out of their WFA and Labour will eventually get to (or at least toward) what it originally proposed.
NI should fund social care and be ringfenced for that though you could extend NI for social care to those retired but not yet in care homes
Otherwise you end up with an Italian style technocrat government for a while imposing austerity and tax rises which is ultimately still replaced by an elected populist cake for all party anyway
The managers of public organisations would probably be more likely to resort to criminality, to protect reputations.
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/cost-of-living/state-pensioners-warned-labour-could-31814978
I suspect this is in large part a political mess that they couldn't have escaped - a relatively hostile commentariat would have found something else (you've listed several possible things) to castigate them with were it not WFP.
I suspect Labour hoped that, with time, it would have been seen as a relatively sensible cut that signaled a small step towards sound fiscal management. But this narrative clearly hasn't happened, and probably wouldn't have happened - instead it would have remained an albatross around their necks.
I can see the politics that says, after the locals, we can't afford to keep the WFP cut. But I don't like it. Perhaps the UK is simply ungovernable at the moment?
For all our problems we're not somewhere like South Sudan..
Might I direct your to the Child Poverty Action Group/Shelter/DWP pages on this.
An external default event for the UK will be truly shocking and result in hundreds of billions being cut from state expenditure on welfare within months and windfall taxes on generous pension schemes as the government is forced to balance the books in order to rollover existing debt and sell new debt. We may even be forced to sell debt in dollars if confidence in Sterling is low.
It was always a tax, the name is irrelevant.
Using your logic we could merge NI and Income Tax as I advocate, keep the criterion for eligibility of the tax as Income Tax is set by today (so all income is covered equally not just wages), but call the revised tax "National Insurance" . . . then claim tax has been abolished.
Have you even a clue about the cost even ?
And you do know anyway NI is not a hypothecated tax
Don't know about the "doorstep" but that got a right old pasting on here and in the papers.
I mean, perhaps it's not currently possible to present a coherent plan to the electorate that can both: get you re-elected; and pull us out of this economic hole we find ourselves in.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czj4ljxv17xo
Now granted it should have been a direct increase in income tax but politics was involved so it had to be something else