We're not allowed to swear on here any more, but I'd really suggest that no-one clicks on that link to give the 'lovely' fellow who wrote it, and the 'superb' magazine it is in, any click kudos.
We're not allowed to swear any more? I know that c*** is banned because it triggers an admin report. Is this new?
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
I never threw it at you, it was a polite request. I’m interested in it, especially as people are claiming the state pension is not sustainable at its current level.
Where does the money come from ? I’m guessing you have no answer given the word salad above.
If anyone else can expand on the mechanics I’d be interested
Can you explain where the money comes from if we don't have UBI? The scenario is that AI takes a few million jobs out of the economy. Gone, not coming back. Unless the economy is dynamic enough to create equivalent replacement jobs then you're facing a large and permanent unemployment problem.
UBI costs a shitton of money. No disagreement from me here. But in the scenario we're talking about not doing UBI *also* costs a shitton of money.
You rightly ask where the money is coming from. And I don't have a direct answer - I think UBI can free people to be creative and thus more productive but that's not backed with hard numbers. But you also can't explain where to find the money to pay for mass unemployment.
Not spending money is not an option. It's just how we spend it which we can debate.
Farming uses a tiny fraction of the manpower it once did. New jobs sprung up. Robots and automated production lines mean manufacturing jobs vanished. New jobs sprung up. Why is AI going to be different?
Define "jobs". If AI manages to take over all kinds of sectors then you're looking at an enormous number of service jobs replaced by a computer. Unless new jobs are created with pay / conditions / a future of equivalence to the jobs taken, then we have a problem.
You mention farming - which jobs have replaced the people who used to work in farming? A lot of townie types (hi) now living rurally and doing service type jobs with computers. Take those away and...? Its like replacing coal mining jobs with warehousing - "there are jobs" say the people who don't live there. But the community remains hollowed out.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
"Endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past" would be a good way to describe introducing UBI to deal with unemployment after importing millions of workers because of a phantom labour shortage.
Sorry, what "phantom labour shortage" are you referring to? Are you looking at the economy stats at a top line level? Where the vacancies can neatly be filled by the people not in work?
Great! So we have factory jobs in Wisbech making food and there's practically full employment in the fens. We have a large pool of people in Widnes looking for work. So simply fill the roles in Wizzy with woolybacks. Is that the proposal? How?
How do you get from this to your hysterical prediction of "whole communities without jobs"?
Hang on, you mentioned "phantom labour shortage". So you're saying that we don't have labour shortages now?
"For example, the 9500 millionaires widely reported to be leaving the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK’s 3.06 million millionaires."
No need to read much further after this mendacity. Mavis & Bob who own a £750k house and some life savings are not what we're talking about here.
Further reason: it's Richard Murphy's lot.
Exactly, and I started reading it (my god it’s long winded and rambling), and it just echoes talking points from the co-sponsor of the piece, the so called Patriotic Millionaires. Their spokespeople have been doing the rounds recently reiterating these points.
We are losing high net worth people and their taxes. So who pays what we lose from them ? A wealth tax as they advocate ?
We're not allowed to swear on here any more, but I'd really suggest that no-one clicks on that link to give the 'lovely' fellow who wrote it, and the 'superb' magazine it is in, any click kudos.
We're not allowed to swear any more? I know that c*** is banned because it triggers an admin report. Is this new?
Which c*** is banned, one of the usual suspects?
My guess is that you'll never hear from him again. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that... he's gone.
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
I never threw it at you, it was a polite request. I’m interested in it, especially as people are claiming the state pension is not sustainable at its current level.
Where does the money come from ? I’m guessing you have no answer given the word salad above.
If anyone else can expand on the mechanics I’d be interested
Can you explain where the money comes from if we don't have UBI? The scenario is that AI takes a few million jobs out of the economy. Gone, not coming back. Unless the economy is dynamic enough to create equivalent replacement jobs then you're facing a large and permanent unemployment problem.
UBI costs a shitton of money. No disagreement from me here. But in the scenario we're talking about not doing UBI *also* costs a shitton of money.
You rightly ask where the money is coming from. And I don't have a direct answer - I think UBI can free people to be creative and thus more productive but that's not backed with hard numbers. But you also can't explain where to find the money to pay for mass unemployment.
Not spending money is not an option. It's just how we spend it which we can debate.
I think you’re confusing my position as being anti UBI. I’m not.
You’re advocating it, I’m interested how it would work. I’d benefit from it. At the moment the best we have is ‘we have to do it’. So we have a destination but no journey to get there.
However you cannot just print money to fund it and a robot tax only works globally.
My point is that we pay whether we have it or not. Same as the idiocy of the LabCon cutting funding to the police thinking this will save money. Either we pay for police officers or we pay for the consequences of crime. There is no saving to be had.
A massive structural weakness in the British economy is that output per worker is so low. Millions of people are trapped in jobs that don't pay their bills and offer them no opportunities to grow and develop.
How can we empower people to work more productively? Allow them to do the work that they want to do - especially as AI threatens so many whole sectors of employment we have today. You can't change job because you are an economic slave - but what if you weren't? Pay everyone a basic income and suddenly those choices are freed up, those opportunities made possible.
I sound like Farage when I say that part of it is paid for by rolling most high cost to serve welfare into it (bye bye UC etc) and partly by unlocking productivity and therefore economic output.
My point is that the status quo is broken and we need to stop with the fallacy that we can cut our way to growth. Cut spending on police and pay for more crime. Cut spending on preventative health and pay for more emergency health. Prevention is always cheaper and yet we can't afford police officers and teachers apparently.
BBC News, Uber to trial driverless cars in London.
Govt bringing forward plans to allow these trials in Spring 2026.
Wouldn’t like a career as a cab driver. Uber drivers have been complaining about fares recently. They’ll all be out of a job in five years, the Luddite cabbies could rise up and smash the taxis for taking their jobs.
We're not allowed to swear on here any more, but I'd really suggest that no-one clicks on that link to give the 'lovely' fellow who wrote it, and the 'superb' magazine it is in, any click kudos.
We're not allowed to swear any more? I know that c*** is banned because it triggers an admin report. Is this new?
Which c*** is banned, one of the usual suspects?
My guess is that you'll never hear from him again. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that... he's gone.
I know that quote from ‘Usual Suspects’, I’m guessing it’s not just from that film.
Failed Apprentice candidate, ran a business selling pillows. Had a brush with the law. Says ‘Bosh’ a lot and posts on Twitter eating pie and mash.
Sounds entirely over-qualified. Is bosh the new cripes? Only the ultra sophisticated world city of London can possibly know. Too high brow for us provincials.
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
I never threw it at you, it was a polite request. I’m interested in it, especially as people are claiming the state pension is not sustainable at its current level.
Where does the money come from ? I’m guessing you have no answer given the word salad above.
If anyone else can expand on the mechanics I’d be interested
Can you explain where the money comes from if we don't have UBI? The scenario is that AI takes a few million jobs out of the economy. Gone, not coming back. Unless the economy is dynamic enough to create equivalent replacement jobs then you're facing a large and permanent unemployment problem.
UBI costs a shitton of money. No disagreement from me here. But in the scenario we're talking about not doing UBI *also* costs a shitton of money.
You rightly ask where the money is coming from. And I don't have a direct answer - I think UBI can free people to be creative and thus more productive but that's not backed with hard numbers. But you also can't explain where to find the money to pay for mass unemployment.
Not spending money is not an option. It's just how we spend it which we can debate.
Farming uses a tiny fraction of the manpower it once did. New jobs sprung up. Robots and automated production lines mean manufacturing jobs vanished. New jobs sprung up. Why is AI going to be different?
Define "jobs". If AI manages to take over all kinds of sectors then you're looking at an enormous number of service jobs replaced by a computer. Unless new jobs are created with pay / conditions / a future of equivalence to the jobs taken, then we have a problem.
You mention farming - which jobs have replaced the people who used to work in farming? A lot of townie types (hi) now living rurally and doing service type jobs with computers. Take those away and...? Its like replacing coal mining jobs with warehousing - "there are jobs" say the people who don't live there. But the community remains hollowed out.
"which jobs have replaced the people who used to work in farming?"
The great transfer of jobs away from agricultural happened in the 19th century because of the industrial revolution and further speeded up by the Agricultural Depression of the 1870s. They left the land to go to cities to work in factories. Now those jobs have gone in turn.
Failed Apprentice candidate, ran a business selling pillows. Had a brush with the law. Says ‘Bosh’ a lot and posts on Twitter eating pie and mash.
Sounds entirely over-qualified. Is bosh the new cripes? Only the ultra sophisticated world city of London can possibly know. Too high brow for us provincials.
Fluent Twatney speaker with a weird sideline in positive reinforcement.
Thomas Skinner ⚒ @iamtomskinner · 9 Jun If you’re reading this… You are perfect, you are enough, and you are loved. Never forget it. Keep going. You’ve got this. ❤️💪
"For example, the 9500 millionaires widely reported to be leaving the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK’s 3.06 million millionaires."
No need to read much further after this mendacity. Mavis & Bob who own a £750k house and some life savings are not what we're talking about here.
Further reason: it's Richard Murphy's lot.
Exactly, and I started reading it (my god it’s long winded and rambling), and it just echoes talking points from the co-sponsor of the piece, the so called Patriotic Millionaires. Their spokespeople have been doing the rounds recently reiterating these points.
We are losing high net worth people and their taxes. So who pays what we lose from them ? A wealth tax as they advocate ?
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
If AI leads to mass unemployment it would be funded by a robot tax
The unemployment will be in thought / clerical work and that’s not going to be taxable because good luck working out where the server the AI was running on for that transaction is?
All companies which have announced net job losses would be assumed to have done so by AI and would therefore have the robot tax imposed on them automatically, no need to trace any servers.
If we get to mass unemployment forget free market capitalism, that would be dead, the government will get more and more statist with each job replaced by AI as no party could get elected otherwise
That's one of the maddest suggestions I've heard for a while. Think about the logic for a moment. Imagine you run a widget factory, employing 100 people. Unfortunately, there is a downturn in the widgets market, sales drop, and so you lay 25 workers off. The system sees you making people redundant, and so you get hit by the robot tax. You shed more staff to try and control costs, and the robot tax increases. Go round that cycle a couple of times, and eventually you've no staff, no income, but presumably a massive tax bill.
Essentially it would destroy any business that needed to lay off staff for any reason other than productivity gains.
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
If AI leads to mass unemployment it would be funded by a robot tax
The unemployment will be in thought / clerical work and that’s not going to be taxable because good luck working out where the server the AI was running on for that transaction is?
All companies which have announced net job losses would be assumed to have done so by AI and would therefore have the robot tax imposed on them automatically, no need to trace any servers.
If we get to mass unemployment forget free market capitalism, that would be dead, the government will get more and more statist with each job replaced by AI as no party could get elected otherwise
That's one of the maddest suggestions I've heard for a while. Think about the logic for a moment. Imagine you run a widget factory, employing 100 people. Unfortunately, there is a downturn in the widgets market, sales drop, and so you lay 25 workers off. The system sees you making people redundant, and so you get hit by the robot tax. You shed more staff to try and control costs, and the robot tax increases. Go round that cycle a couple of times, and eventually you've no staff, no income, but presumably a massive tax bill.
Essentially it would destroy any business that needed to lay off staff for any reason other than productivity gains.
This is not just about your widgets market. I am talking about mass unemployment of 50% plus in EVERY market due to AI with at least half of the population unable to find permanent work.
In that scenario no party would ever get elected again without promising a UBI funded by a robot tax on every corporation using AI
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
I never threw it at you, it was a polite request. I’m interested in it, especially as people are claiming the state pension is not sustainable at its current level.
Where does the money come from ? I’m guessing you have no answer given the word salad above.
If anyone else can expand on the mechanics I’d be interested
Can you explain where the money comes from if we don't have UBI? The scenario is that AI takes a few million jobs out of the economy. Gone, not coming back. Unless the economy is dynamic enough to create equivalent replacement jobs then you're facing a large and permanent unemployment problem.
UBI costs a shitton of money. No disagreement from me here. But in the scenario we're talking about not doing UBI *also* costs a shitton of money.
You rightly ask where the money is coming from. And I don't have a direct answer - I think UBI can free people to be creative and thus more productive but that's not backed with hard numbers. But you also can't explain where to find the money to pay for mass unemployment.
Not spending money is not an option. It's just how we spend it which we can debate.
Farming uses a tiny fraction of the manpower it once did. New jobs sprung up. Robots and automated production lines mean manufacturing jobs vanished. New jobs sprung up. Why is AI going to be different?
Define "jobs". If AI manages to take over all kinds of sectors then you're looking at an enormous number of service jobs replaced by a computer. Unless new jobs are created with pay / conditions / a future of equivalence to the jobs taken, then we have a problem.
You mention farming - which jobs have replaced the people who used to work in farming? A lot of townie types (hi) now living rurally and doing service type jobs with computers. Take those away and...? Its like replacing coal mining jobs with warehousing - "there are jobs" say the people who don't live there. But the community remains hollowed out.
I would have thought that jobs affected by AI are much less geographically concentrated than coal mining or farming.
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
Ultimately the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was an Act of Parliament.
After the Irish War of Independence and IRA bombing campaign
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
If AI leads to mass unemployment it would be funded by a robot tax
The unemployment will be in thought / clerical work and that’s not going to be taxable because good luck working out where the server the AI was running on for that transaction is?
All companies which have announced net job losses would be assumed to have done so by AI and would therefore have the robot tax imposed on them automatically, no need to trace any servers.
If we get to mass unemployment forget free market capitalism, that would be dead, the government will get more and more statist with each job replaced by AI as no party could get elected otherwise
That's one of the maddest suggestions I've heard for a while. Think about the logic for a moment. Imagine you run a widget factory, employing 100 people. Unfortunately, there is a downturn in the widgets market, sales drop, and so you lay 25 workers off. The system sees you making people redundant, and so you get hit by the robot tax. You shed more staff to try and control costs, and the robot tax increases. Go round that cycle a couple of times, and eventually you've no staff, no income, but presumably a massive tax bill.
Essentially it would destroy any business that needed to lay off staff for any reason other than productivity gains.
This is not just about your widgets market. I am talking about mass unemployment of 50% plus in EVERY market due to AI with at least half of the population unable to find permanent work.
In that scenario no party would ever get elected again without promising a UBI funded by a robot tax on every corporation using AI
Is there any real reason to believe that AI will lead to “mass unemployment of 50% plus in EVERY market”?
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
That was a hundred years ago.
This is the same kind of language that extreme Afrikaaners came out with before the end of apartheid, referencing the Boer War and even earlier conflicts. In the end, they just accepted it and moved on.
Ireland is not the dirt-poor backwater of embedded mystical popery that they like to imagine.
The terrorist war between the IRA and UVF and LVF wasn't 100 years ago, it only ended just over 25 years ago and even now splinter factions are still planting the odd bomb. Orange Order parades still get large attendance, including young people leading the marching, based on fervent defiance of Popery and Dublin.
Not all Afrikaaners have accepted ANC South Africa either, indeed Orania is a rapidly growing white Afrikaner only separatist enclave in South Africa
Well, in violence comes, violence comes. As you note, many things in Ireland have come with violence before, during and after. It shouldn't be a driving factor in decision-making - though the minimisation of it by prudent policing and security work, as well as political activity, should be.
Either way though, if Northern Ireland votes to unite, that should be, and will be, that: unification will follow - though the terms will still need to be negotiated.
In your middle class liberal view, in the view of Protestant Unionist DUP and TUV voters accepting Dublin rule would be a betrayal of their culture and very identify, they would never accept that and would push for UDI with LVF and UVF resuming a bombing campaign if efforts were made to try and stop that
Failed Apprentice candidate, ran a business selling pillows. Had a brush with the law. Says ‘Bosh’ a lot and posts on Twitter eating pie and mash.
Sounds entirely over-qualified. Is bosh the new cripes? Only the ultra sophisticated world city of London can possibly know. Too high brow for us provincials.
Hey, he was on Celebrity Masterchef so maybe not !!
Anyway, here he is feasting on pie and mash with Nick Love and Danny Dyer.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
That was a hundred years ago.
This is the same kind of language that extreme Afrikaaners came out with before the end of apartheid, referencing the Boer War and even earlier conflicts. In the end, they just accepted it and moved on.
Ireland is not the dirt-poor backwater of embedded mystical popery that they like to imagine.
The terrorist war between the IRA and UVF and LVF wasn't 100 years ago, it only ended just over 25 years ago and even now splinter factions are still planting the odd bomb. Orange Order parades still get large attendance, including young people leading the marching, based on fervent defiance of Popery and Dublin.
Not all Afrikaaners have accepted ANC South Africa either, indeed Orania is a rapidly growing white Afrikaner only separatist enclave in South Africa
Well, in violence comes, violence comes. As you note, many things in Ireland have come with violence before, during and after. It shouldn't be a driving factor in decision-making - though the minimisation of it by prudent policing and security work, as well as political activity, should be.
Either way though, if Northern Ireland votes to unite, that should be, and will be, that: unification will follow - though the terms will still need to be negotiated.
In your middle class liberal view, in the view of Protestant Unionist DUP and TUV voters accepting Dublin rule would be a betrayal of their culture and very identify, they would never accept that and would push for UDI with LVF and UVF resuming a bombing campaign if efforts were made to try and stop that
BBC News, Uber to trial driverless cars in London.
Govt bringing forward plans to allow these trials in Spring 2026.
Wouldn’t like a career as a cab driver. Uber drivers have been complaining about fares recently. They’ll all be out of a job in five years, the Luddite cabbies could rise up and smash the taxis for taking their jobs.
Does Uber have driverless cars running anywhere in the world?
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
Fluent Twatney speaker with a weird sideline in positive reinforcement.
Thomas Skinner ⚒ @iamtomskinner · 9 Jun If you’re reading this… You are perfect, you are enough, and you are loved. Never forget it. Keep going. You’ve got this. ❤️💪
BBC News, Uber to trial driverless cars in London.
Govt bringing forward plans to allow these trials in Spring 2026.
What we really need is driverless trains not cars. Funny how the focus is on the wrong thing so often.
Driverless trains are easy on closed systems. Same trains, same usage, contained, controlled. The problem is that our system isn't any of those things.
Well, well, well. Today's tame Reform interview involves new Chairman Dr David Bull.
The BBC will be able to string this out to the next GE at this rate.
Isn't that a good thing? Nick Griffen's bubble burst in the headlights of public scrutiny. One appearance on Question Time was all it took.
Surely scrutinising Reform day in, day out until the election is good? Frankly a bit more scrutiny of the Ming Vase might have been good last year,
Took a feckin long time for Griffin's bubble to burst in that case given the BNP had their best ever GE result 7 months later. Obviously the sophisticated UK electorate thought we'll give Nicky Nazi one more chance. Alternatively Farage took over the xenophobe mantle very soon after, though the disinfectant of sunlight of dozens of QT appearances didn't seem to harm his bubble in the slightest.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
The thinking seems to go: "well I'm not going to leave so they must be lying when they say they are". It doesn't occur to these types that the super rich are more motivated by money than the rest of us - not to mention more mobile. Again, it's an utter failure to see things from someone else's point of view.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
The thinking seems to go: "well I'm not going to leave so they must be lying when they say they are". It doesn't occur to these types that the super rich are more motivated by money than the rest of us - not to mention more mobile. Again, it's an utter failure to see things from someone else's point of view.
The other thing is that a lot of people aren’t especially tied to this country. And it’s not just the super rich.
Consider a work colleague - he’s a first generation Indian immigrant. Applying for citizenship etc. He’s been here 5 years.
If life looks better in Germany, why shouldn’t he leave?
Fluent Twatney speaker with a weird sideline in positive reinforcement.
Thomas Skinner ⚒ @iamtomskinner · 9 Jun If you’re reading this… You are perfect, you are enough, and you are loved. Never forget it. Keep going. You’ve got this. ❤️💪
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I think you're arguing about something different to the linked article/millionaires news.
That appears to suggest that huge amounts of coverage was based on "research" from a company whose business is to encourage rich people to move to different countries. The initial research is essentially advertising, disguised as "news".
The key takeaway for me was the line...
In 2021, Henley described 2000 millionaires leaving the UK as “insignificant” but in 2023 described 1600 millionaires leaving the UK an “exodus”.
They appear to put out regular "research", which mean very little beyond what is likely to generate the most mentions of their name at the time they send out the press releases.
Well, well, well. Today's tame Reform interview involves new Chairman Dr David Bull.
The BBC will be able to string this out to the next GE at this rate.
Isn't that a good thing? Nick Griffen's bubble burst in the headlights of public scrutiny. One appearance on Question Time was all it took.
Surely scrutinising Reform day in, day out until the election is good? Frankly a bit more scrutiny of the Ming Vase might have been good last year,
Took a feckin long time for Griffin's bubble to burst in that case given the BNP had their best ever GE result 7 months later. Obviously the sophisticated UK electorate thought we'll give Nicky Nazi one more chance. Alternatively Farage took over the xenophobe mantle very soon after, though the disinfectant of sunlight of dozens of QT appearances didn't seem to harm his bubble in the slightest.
That's because he's very good and invariably those he's up against in this scenarios talk more shite than he does.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
The thinking seems to go: "well I'm not going to leave so they must be lying when they say they are". It doesn't occur to these types that the super rich are more motivated by money than the rest of us - not to mention more mobile. Again, it's an utter failure to see things from someone else's point of view.
It's the "good riddance" attitude that really seems odd to me, like yes, let's wave goodbye to billions in tax from a very small number of people that pays for public services and investment etc... It's truly bizarre.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I think you're arguing about something different to the linked article/millionaires news.
That appears to suggest that huge amounts of coverage was based on "research" from a company whose business is to encourage rich people to move to different countries. The initial research is essentially advertising, disguised as "news".
The key takeaway for me was the line...
In 2021, Henley described 2000 millionaires leaving the UK as “insignificant” but in 2023 described 1600 millionaires leaving the UK an “exodus”.
They appear to put out regular "research", which mean very little beyond what is likely to generate the most mentions of their name at the time they send out the press releases.
Chad fertility rate is currently SIX per woman, massively above ours
Bangladesh was at 6 per woman a generation ago. Now it's about 2.
Decline in Asian birth rates are one of the most surprising things of my lifetime.
Exactly. HYUFD misses my point. Chad is high but is declining and has been, as that link shows, for many years. The fact some nations have high birth rates now doesn’t mean that will always be the case. Bangladesh, as you cite.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
The thinking seems to go: "well I'm not going to leave so they must be lying when they say they are". It doesn't occur to these types that the super rich are more motivated by money than the rest of us - not to mention more mobile. Again, it's an utter failure to see things from someone else's point of view.
I could understand it if these super rich were competing for resources with the likes of Bondegezou but I don’t think they are after the same Mayfair houses and places at elite schools for their kids. And there are plenty of big country piles around if Bondegezou is worried about not having a big enough choice.
It really makes the tiniest of any negative difference to 99% of the population if you set a special tax incentive to attract in the hugely wealthy - not only will you get tax that you didn’t have before, even if not at normal % rate, but you will get their spending on goods and services which employs more people and generate tax and spend from those people too.
And guess what, they might think it’s worth setting up an arm of their business in the country that they live in and makes them feel welcome. Which will add to growth and tax.
The resistance is one of stupidity or envy - we can tax these suckers dry, what are they going to do/not fair these people have so much more than me so heat we punish them.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I think you're arguing about something different to the linked article/millionaires news.
That appears to suggest that huge amounts of coverage was based on "research" from a company whose business is to encourage rich people to move to different countries. The initial research is essentially advertising, disguised as "news".
The key takeaway for me was the line...
In 2021, Henley described 2000 millionaires leaving the UK as “insignificant” but in 2023 described 1600 millionaires leaving the UK an “exodus”.
They appear to put out regular "research", which mean very little beyond what is likely to generate the most mentions of their name at the time they send out the press releases.
There is plenty of other research out there making the same point.
They’re criticising, implicitly, Henley for their research driven by an agenda. They’re no different.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
The thinking seems to go: "well I'm not going to leave so they must be lying when they say they are". It doesn't occur to these types that the super rich are more motivated by money than the rest of us - not to mention more mobile. Again, it's an utter failure to see things from someone else's point of view.
It's the "good riddance" attitude that really seems odd to me, like yes, let's wave goodbye to billions in tax from a very small number of people that pays for public services and investment etc... It's truly bizarre.
We’ve had people here saying the same. I don’t get it either.
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Well, well, well. Today's tame Reform interview involves new Chairman Dr David Bull.
The BBC will be able to string this out to the next GE at this rate.
Isn't that a good thing? Nick Griffen's bubble burst in the headlights of public scrutiny. One appearance on Question Time was all it took.
Surely scrutinising Reform day in, day out until the election is good? Frankly a bit more scrutiny of the Ming Vase might have been good last year,
Took a feckin long time for Griffin's bubble to burst in that case given the BNP had their best ever GE result 7 months later. Obviously the sophisticated UK electorate thought we'll give Nicky Nazi one more chance. Alternatively Farage took over the xenophobe mantle very soon after, though the disinfectant of sunlight of dozens of QT appearances didn't seem to harm his bubble in the slightest.
That's because he's very good and invariably those he's up against in this scenarios talk more shite than he does.
Griffin/BNP never had electoral appeal. The authoritarian explicitly anti-black explicitly racist far right doesn't.
People are behind the curve. Farage needed to get the support of populist voters and he has. He has clearly moved to the socially conservative centre ground of the broad social democrat consensus, with the addition of a strong closed borders policy. He doesn't have policies that will frighten the horses. He has to survive several years with curently a strong support base, the other parties very feeble and Reform having a very fragile leadership team.
The great need is for Lab/Tory and LD to get their narrative skills up to speed, and tell a much better story than Farage does. And appear more competent and more confident about the electorate.
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
"Endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past" would be a good way to describe introducing UBI to deal with unemployment after importing millions of workers because of a phantom labour shortage.
Sorry, what "phantom labour shortage" are you referring to? Are you looking at the economy stats at a top line level? Where the vacancies can neatly be filled by the people not in work?
Great! So we have factory jobs in Wisbech making food and there's practically full employment in the fens. We have a large pool of people in Widnes looking for work. So simply fill the roles in Wizzy with woolybacks. Is that the proposal? How?
How do you get from this to your hysterical prediction of "whole communities without jobs"?
Hang on, you mentioned "phantom labour shortage". So you're saying that we don't have labour shortages now?
No, we don't. That's a concept that doesn't actually exist since lump of labour is a fallacy.
We have firms who want to hire people below the market rate for wages.
If you can't fill a vacancy, you aren't paying enough.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
The crass stupidity makes me want to weep. And it so often comes from witless clueless middle class lefty saps in the public sector, who haven’t got the brains, balls or imagination to start a fifty quid business let alone a fifty million quid business
The thinking seems to go: "well I'm not going to leave so they must be lying when they say they are". It doesn't occur to these types that the super rich are more motivated by money than the rest of us - not to mention more mobile. Again, it's an utter failure to see things from someone else's point of view.
I could understand it if these super rich were competing for resources with the likes of Bondegezou but I don’t think they are after the same Mayfair houses and places at elite schools for their kids. And there are plenty of big country piles around if Bondegezou is worried about not having a big enough choice.
It really makes the tiniest of any negative difference to 99% of the population if you set a special tax incentive to attract in the hugely wealthy - not only will you get tax that you didn’t have before, even if not at normal % rate, but you will get their spending on goods and services which employs more people and generate tax and spend from those people too.
And guess what, they might think it’s worth setting up an arm of their business in the country that they live in and makes them feel welcome. Which will add to growth and tax.
The resistance is one of stupidity or envy - we can tax these suckers dry, what are they going to do/not fair these people have so much more than me so heat we punish them.
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
They know the government is weak and poor at negotiating though. They'll probably get their debts taken on by the state with no haircut and get to keep the assets. That's how shit Starmer is.
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
"Endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past" would be a good way to describe introducing UBI to deal with unemployment after importing millions of workers because of a phantom labour shortage.
Sorry, what "phantom labour shortage" are you referring to? Are you looking at the economy stats at a top line level? Where the vacancies can neatly be filled by the people not in work?
Great! So we have factory jobs in Wisbech making food and there's practically full employment in the fens. We have a large pool of people in Widnes looking for work. So simply fill the roles in Wizzy with woolybacks. Is that the proposal? How?
How do you get from this to your hysterical prediction of "whole communities without jobs"?
Hang on, you mentioned "phantom labour shortage". So you're saying that we don't have labour shortages now?
On the UBI "debate" I've already had the question "where does the money come from" thrown at me. Stop. Reverse that. Let's assume we don't do it.
We are going to lose an awful lot of jobs. Vast numbers of them. People who will be unemployable because the jobs simply won't be there any more.
We can't afford UBI? What is the cost of not UBI? Of whole communities without jobs? Of people stuck on welfare with no hope of a job? We're not talking small pit villages - we coped with those by throwing shitloads of investment at them. Broaden than out on a vast scale - there is a HUGE cost.
Where does the money for that come from? We can invest in the future. Or invest in endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past.
"Endless waste not fixing the mistakes of the past" would be a good way to describe introducing UBI to deal with unemployment after importing millions of workers because of a phantom labour shortage.
Sorry, what "phantom labour shortage" are you referring to? Are you looking at the economy stats at a top line level? Where the vacancies can neatly be filled by the people not in work?
Great! So we have factory jobs in Wisbech making food and there's practically full employment in the fens. We have a large pool of people in Widnes looking for work. So simply fill the roles in Wizzy with woolybacks. Is that the proposal? How?
How do you get from this to your hysterical prediction of "whole communities without jobs"?
Hang on, you mentioned "phantom labour shortage". So you're saying that we don't have labour shortages now?
Chad fertility rate is currently SIX per woman, massively above ours
Bangladesh was at 6 per woman a generation ago. Now it's about 2.
Decline in Asian birth rates are one of the most surprising things of my lifetime.
Exactly. HYUFD misses my point. Chad is high but is declining and has been, as that link shows, for many years. The fact some nations have high birth rates now doesn’t mean that will always be the case. Bangladesh, as you cite.
Even Bangladesh is still basically at replacement rate, not well below replacement rate like the UK now is with all the extra taxes that will have to be slammed on the working age population to fund those of retirement age
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I think you're arguing about something different to the linked article/millionaires news.
That appears to suggest that huge amounts of coverage was based on "research" from a company whose business is to encourage rich people to move to different countries. The initial research is essentially advertising, disguised as "news".
The key takeaway for me was the line...
In 2021, Henley described 2000 millionaires leaving the UK as “insignificant” but in 2023 described 1600 millionaires leaving the UK an “exodus”.
They appear to put out regular "research", which mean very little beyond what is likely to generate the most mentions of their name at the time they send out the press releases.
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
That was a hundred years ago.
This is the same kind of language that extreme Afrikaaners came out with before the end of apartheid, referencing the Boer War and even earlier conflicts. In the end, they just accepted it and moved on.
Ireland is not the dirt-poor backwater of embedded mystical popery that they like to imagine.
The terrorist war between the IRA and UVF and LVF wasn't 100 years ago, it only ended just over 25 years ago and even now splinter factions are still planting the odd bomb. Orange Order parades still get large attendance, including young people leading the marching, based on fervent defiance of Popery and Dublin.
Not all Afrikaaners have accepted ANC South Africa either, indeed Orania is a rapidly growing white Afrikaner only separatist enclave in South Africa
Well, in violence comes, violence comes. As you note, many things in Ireland have come with violence before, during and after. It shouldn't be a driving factor in decision-making - though the minimisation of it by prudent policing and security work, as well as political activity, should be.
Either way though, if Northern Ireland votes to unite, that should be, and will be, that: unification will follow - though the terms will still need to be negotiated.
In your middle class liberal view, in the view of Protestant Unionist DUP and TUV voters accepting Dublin rule would be a betrayal of their culture and very identify, they would never accept that and would push for UDI with LVF and UVF resuming a bombing campaign if efforts were made to try and stop that
They're free to campaign through the democratic process, the same as anyone else. If they take to violence then fuck them and their so-called army.
Frankly, from their oppositionist attitude to just about everything ever proposed in Northern Ireland, from Home Rule to Brexit deals and beyond, they're their own worst enemy. I am not remotely interested in protecting people whose identity is based on that level of intolerance.
Generally the more religious the population of child bearing age the higher the fertility rate.
Hence globally Muslims have the highest birthrate, then evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews, then Roman Catholics then mainline Protestants and Hindus and liberal Jews and last atheists
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
Exactly.
Managed bankruptcy for public ltd is exactly about this. The debt is killed off in order of seniority until the ship refloats.
What the government needs to do is to legislate to cover the debts to suppliers itself. As a loan to Thames Water. At a suitable interest rate. At the highest seniority.
So during the bankruptcy, there is no pressure on the supply chain. So they will happily carry on supplying pipe, valves etc.
Once the bankruptcy is resolved, the refloated (ha!) company will be able to pay the government back. Trivially. It will be a month or two of supply costs, at most.
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
That was a hundred years ago.
This is the same kind of language that extreme Afrikaaners came out with before the end of apartheid, referencing the Boer War and even earlier conflicts. In the end, they just accepted it and moved on.
Ireland is not the dirt-poor backwater of embedded mystical popery that they like to imagine.
The terrorist war between the IRA and UVF and LVF wasn't 100 years ago, it only ended just over 25 years ago and even now splinter factions are still planting the odd bomb. Orange Order parades still get large attendance, including young people leading the marching, based on fervent defiance of Popery and Dublin.
Not all Afrikaaners have accepted ANC South Africa either, indeed Orania is a rapidly growing white Afrikaner only separatist enclave in South Africa
Well, in violence comes, violence comes. As you note, many things in Ireland have come with violence before, during and after. It shouldn't be a driving factor in decision-making - though the minimisation of it by prudent policing and security work, as well as political activity, should be.
Either way though, if Northern Ireland votes to unite, that should be, and will be, that: unification will follow - though the terms will still need to be negotiated.
In your middle class liberal view, in the view of Protestant Unionist DUP and TUV voters accepting Dublin rule would be a betrayal of their culture and very identify, they would never accept that and would push for UDI with LVF and UVF resuming a bombing campaign if efforts were made to try and stop that
They're free to campaign through the democratic process, the same as anyone else. If they take to violence then fuck them and their so-called army.
Frankly, from their oppositionist attitude to just about everything ever proposed in Northern Ireland, from Home Rule to Brexit deals and beyond, they're their own worst enemy. I am not remotely interested in protecting people whose identity is based on that level of intolerance.
The current peace process is exactly about bribing the Men of Violence on both sides to not be violent.
In NI the police are strictly constrained *not to investigate* certain crimes because of this.
The face eating leopards were carefully fed and encouraged when they ate faces. As long as they ate faces according to certain rules.
Now we are supposed to be surprised about all the face eating leopards who feel entitled.
That’s such a disingenuous article. It spends half the article splitting hairs about whether the use of the word “exodus ” is appropriate which shows how desperate it is.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I think you're arguing about something different to the linked article/millionaires news.
That appears to suggest that huge amounts of coverage was based on "research" from a company whose business is to encourage rich people to move to different countries. The initial research is essentially advertising, disguised as "news".
The key takeaway for me was the line...
In 2021, Henley described 2000 millionaires leaving the UK as “insignificant” but in 2023 described 1600 millionaires leaving the UK an “exodus”.
They appear to put out regular "research", which mean very little beyond what is likely to generate the most mentions of their name at the time they send out the press releases.
There is plenty of other research out there making the same point.
They’re criticising, implicitly, Henley for their research driven by an agenda. They’re no different.
I can appreciate that - although I think I'd argue that Henley were the ones who made the misleading claims in the first place. So, the Tax Justice Network at least have the moral middleground in this situation.
I'd also assume there is a lot of research, and a quick Google search suggests a huge range of sources. Curiously, all the ones on the first page (for me), which reference an exodus, ultimately went back to Henley press releases. It took about 5 clicks through different people quoting each other in some cases, but I've got to admit I was surprised at just how successful their "research" worm has wriggled across the internet.
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
They know the government is weak and poor at negotiating though. They'll probably get their debts taken on by the state with no haircut and get to keep the assets. That's how shit Starmer is.
Thought the Faroese were giving up on that. Or is that this year?
Must admit I've always wanted to go there. A stop was scheduled on a cruise to Iceland once, but the ship developed engine problems and had to cut out several ports of call. Quite annoying.
Thought the Faroese were giving up on that. Or is that this year?
Must admit I've always wanted to go there. A stop was scheduled on a cruise to Iceland once, but the ship developed engine problems and had to cut out several ports of call. Quite annoying.
Who gives a toss about a bunch of stupid whales anyway. If you ask me the Faroese should kill MORE - as these dumb critters clearly deserve it - let’s have an end to this Woke “don’t slaughter everything that moves” nonsense*
*this revised opinion has nothing to do with the fact my entire trip is being funded by Faroese Tourism, Inc
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
They know the government is weak and poor at negotiating though. They'll probably get their debts taken on by the state with no haircut and get to keep the assets. That's how shit Starmer is.
He’d pay full price for a Domino’s pizza.
And Reeves would have bought a 3-piece suite at DFS on the one day in the year there wasn't a 60% off sale....
I'm particularly interested in "no one has a single good explanation". That's the aspect that fascinates me. When I learned demographics in GCSE georgraphy, the explanations of each of stages 1-4 were fairly succinct. But it's not obvious why stage 5 of declining birth rates should kick in. It's a theme common to all societies: religious and secular; collectivist and individualist. Peter Zeihan has suggested its a feature of urbanisation, which I find semi-convincing - but urban Victorian Britain wasn't really known for small families - so I don't think it's an inherent feature. There is much to discuss about da yoof's ineptitude at meeting and mating and breeding - but I don't think that's the whole explanation either.
I have a hypothesis: that low birth rates are an inherent feature of a) top-heavy population pyramids, and b) rapidly aging populations. This is because, whatever the set-up of the society, the older a population is and the faster it ages, the more resources have to be expended on the old, so the fewer resources are available for the young. So the young end up without the means to afford the bare minimum they perceive that they require in order to breed (largely, a big enough house, but also the time resources to bring up the child). This is true whether those resources are state resources or individual resources; and whether those resources are money or time or effort. When I've tried to explain this hypothesis to people in the past, they've tended to dismiss it by reference to their own example ("well our decision to have children was nothing to do with the presence of grandparents*"), but averaged over a whole society I think there might be something in it. Not least because it is a common feature of all societies with dropping birth rates.
There's something in all this about relative standards of living between children and parents, but I think there's something to work with there.
*Actually, to generalise from myself: we'd have always had a first child if we could - and, being reasonably well-off, a second - but we almost certainly wouldn't have had a third were it not for an inheritance a couple of years previously, which had enabled us to buy a house with a bedroom in which to put said child...
Well, well, well. Today's tame Reform interview involves new Chairman Dr David Bull.
The BBC will be able to string this out to the next GE at this rate.
Isn't that a good thing? Nick Griffen's bubble burst in the headlights of public scrutiny. One appearance on Question Time was all it took.
Surely scrutinising Reform day in, day out until the election is good? Frankly a bit more scrutiny of the Ming Vase might have been good last year,
Took a feckin long time for Griffin's bubble to burst in that case given the BNP had their best ever GE result 7 months later. Obviously the sophisticated UK electorate thought we'll give Nicky Nazi one more chance. Alternatively Farage took over the xenophobe mantle very soon after, though the disinfectant of sunlight of dozens of QT appearances didn't seem to harm his bubble in the slightest.
That's because he's very good and invariably those he's up against in this scenarios talk more shite than he does.
Griffin/BNP never had electoral appeal. The authoritarian explicitly anti-black explicitly racist far right doesn't.
People are behind the curve. Farage needed to get the support of populist voters and he has. He has clearly moved to the socially conservative centre ground of the broad social democrat consensus, with the addition of a strong closed borders policy. He doesn't have policies that will frighten the horses. He has to survive several years with curently a strong support base, the other parties very feeble and Reform having a very fragile leadership team.
The great need is for Lab/Tory and LD to get their narrative skills up to speed, and tell a much better story than Farage does. And appear more competent and more confident about the electorate.
I don't think that's really an appropriate description. Modern social democracy is about the veneration and growth of the state, and its mores and rules. Reform wants to cut the state and its mores and rules, quite radically in some areas, but extend its role in others.
I also wonder how much of it is simply brought on by necessity. The steelworks of Port Talbot and Scunthorpe cannot exist without Government support of some sort, but that’s not their fault, it's the fault of wretched short-sighted policies over many years. A lot of Reform's recommendations seem to be a last ditch attempt to save these capabilities, rather than committed social democracy.
Either way, I would like (and I think it's more possible now than ever before) to have two party politics with Reform on the left and the Tories on the right. A small state sound money Gladstonian party (Tories) vs. a more interventionist but still very patriotic party (Reform), would rid us of the corrosive effect of the anti-British decision makers who have been running the show for many decades.
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
They know the government is weak and poor at negotiating though. They'll probably get their debts taken on by the state with no haircut and get to keep the assets. That's how shit Starmer is.
He’d pay full price for a Domino’s pizza.
And Reeves would have bought a 3-piece suite at DFS on the one day in the year there wasn't a 60% off sale....
We recently bought a 3-piece suite at DFS a few weeks ago, we were incredibly fortunate with the timing though as there was a sale on and a promotion to get 4 years interest free credit, both of which ended the following Tuesday.
What were the odds of us getting both such a sale and such a promotion days before they both end?
Had we not got it then, we'd have had to have acted now where there's a sale on and a promotion to get 4 years interest free credit.
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
That was a hundred years ago.
This is the same kind of language that extreme Afrikaaners came out with before the end of apartheid, referencing the Boer War and even earlier conflicts. In the end, they just accepted it and moved on.
Ireland is not the dirt-poor backwater of embedded mystical popery that they like to imagine.
The terrorist war between the IRA and UVF and LVF wasn't 100 years ago, it only ended just over 25 years ago and even now splinter factions are still planting the odd bomb. Orange Order parades still get large attendance, including young people leading the marching, based on fervent defiance of Popery and Dublin.
Not all Afrikaaners have accepted ANC South Africa either, indeed Orania is a rapidly growing white Afrikaner only separatist enclave in South Africa
Well, in violence comes, violence comes. As you note, many things in Ireland have come with violence before, during and after. It shouldn't be a driving factor in decision-making - though the minimisation of it by prudent policing and security work, as well as political activity, should be.
Either way though, if Northern Ireland votes to unite, that should be, and will be, that: unification will follow - though the terms will still need to be negotiated.
In your middle class liberal view, in the view of Protestant Unionist DUP and TUV voters accepting Dublin rule would be a betrayal of their culture and very identify, they would never accept that and would push for UDI with LVF and UVF resuming a bombing campaign if efforts were made to try and stop that
They're free to campaign through the democratic process, the same as anyone else. If they take to violence then fuck them and their so-called army.
Frankly, from their oppositionist attitude to just about everything ever proposed in Northern Ireland, from Home Rule to Brexit deals and beyond, they're their own worst enemy. I am not remotely interested in protecting people whose identity is based on that level of intolerance.
Do they care? As they have proved over the decades and indeed centuries Protestant Ulster men are willing to fight to protect their culture.
Given the IRA bombed their way to Irish independence and the GFA and powersharing, why would not Protestant loyalist paramilitaries do the same to protect their homeland if they have to?
Generally the more religious the population of child bearing age the higher the fertility rate.
Hence globally Muslims have the highest birthrate, then evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews, then Roman Catholics then mainline Protestants and Hindus and liberal Jews and last atheists
Well, well, well. Today's tame Reform interview involves new Chairman Dr David Bull.
The BBC will be able to string this out to the next GE at this rate.
Isn't that a good thing? Nick Griffen's bubble burst in the headlights of public scrutiny. One appearance on Question Time was all it took.
Surely scrutinising Reform day in, day out until the election is good? Frankly a bit more scrutiny of the Ming Vase might have been good last year,
Took a feckin long time for Griffin's bubble to burst in that case given the BNP had their best ever GE result 7 months later. Obviously the sophisticated UK electorate thought we'll give Nicky Nazi one more chance. Alternatively Farage took over the xenophobe mantle very soon after, though the disinfectant of sunlight of dozens of QT appearances didn't seem to harm his bubble in the slightest.
That's because he's very good and invariably those he's up against in this scenarios talk more shite than he does.
Griffin/BNP never had electoral appeal. The authoritarian explicitly anti-black explicitly racist far right doesn't.
People are behind the curve. Farage needed to get the support of populist voters and he has. He has clearly moved to the socially conservative centre ground of the broad social democrat consensus, with the addition of a strong closed borders policy. He doesn't have policies that will frighten the horses. He has to survive several years with curently a strong support base, the other parties very feeble and Reform having a very fragile leadership team.
The great need is for Lab/Tory and LD to get their narrative skills up to speed, and tell a much better story than Farage does. And appear more competent and more confident about the electorate.
I don't think that's really an appropriate description. Modern social democracy is about the veneration and growth of the state, and its mores and rules. Reform wants to cut the state and its mores and rules, quite radically in some areas, but extend its role in others.
I also wonder how much of it is simply brought on by necessity. The steelworks of Port Talbot and Scunthorpe cannot exist without Government support of some sort, but that’s not their fault, it's the fault of wretched short-sighted policies over many years. A lot of Reform's recommendations seem to be a last ditch attempt to save these capabilities, rather than committed social democracy.
Either way, I would like (and I think it's more possible now than ever before) to have two party politics with Reform on the left and the Tories on the right. A small state sound money Gladstonian party (Tories) vs. a more interventionist but still very patriotic party (Reform), would rid us of the corrosive effect of the anti-British decision makers who have been running the show for many decades.
Not going to happen, more likely would be LDs on the cultural liberal globalist side and Reform on the cultural right nationalist side if we replace the economic battle of the last century between the Conservatives and Labour with a cultural battle this century.
Though a small Conservative party on the lines you describe could still survive, especially if we have PR, alongside a slightly bigger left of centre Labour party still representing the public sector and students
A 13% lead for Unionists in Northern Ireland is still pretty comfortable. While there is no nationalist majority at Stormont there will be no border poll anyway.
Not forgetting of course that the DUP and TUV would declare UDI for Antrim and East Londonderry rather than ever accept Dublin rule. Northern Ireland being created in the first place as hundreds of thousands of diehard Ulster Protestants had taken up arms rather than be forced to accept Home Rule and being pushed into the new Irish Free State against their will
Is UDI something that DUP and TUV politicians talk about much?
The only place I've heard it mentioned is from you on here, but if other people are talking about it and I've missed it I'd be interested in seeing links.
The DUP and TUV are clear they would never accept Dublin rule.
People forget the Irish Free state was created NOT just by the 1918 SF majority in Ireland but by violence and bombings from the IRA and the Irish War of Independence which lasted until 1921.
Northern Ireland was effectively created by violence too and the Ulster Protestants who took up arms to resist Home Rule and Dublin rule.
The prospect of the LVF and UVF planting bombs again would be inevitable if they ever faced Dublin rule
Inevitable? Really?? What about, you know, democracy?
As I said, democracy ultimately neither created the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. Bombs, terrorism, war and guns did
That was a hundred years ago.
This is the same kind of language that extreme Afrikaaners came out with before the end of apartheid, referencing the Boer War and even earlier conflicts. In the end, they just accepted it and moved on.
Ireland is not the dirt-poor backwater of embedded mystical popery that they like to imagine.
The terrorist war between the IRA and UVF and LVF wasn't 100 years ago, it only ended just over 25 years ago and even now splinter factions are still planting the odd bomb. Orange Order parades still get large attendance, including young people leading the marching, based on fervent defiance of Popery and Dublin.
Not all Afrikaaners have accepted ANC South Africa either, indeed Orania is a rapidly growing white Afrikaner only separatist enclave in South Africa
Well, in violence comes, violence comes. As you note, many things in Ireland have come with violence before, during and after. It shouldn't be a driving factor in decision-making - though the minimisation of it by prudent policing and security work, as well as political activity, should be.
Either way though, if Northern Ireland votes to unite, that should be, and will be, that: unification will follow - though the terms will still need to be negotiated.
In your middle class liberal view, in the view of Protestant Unionist DUP and TUV voters accepting Dublin rule would be a betrayal of their culture and very identify, they would never accept that and would push for UDI with LVF and UVF resuming a bombing campaign if efforts were made to try and stop that
They're free to campaign through the democratic process, the same as anyone else. If they take to violence then fuck them and their so-called army.
Frankly, from their oppositionist attitude to just about everything ever proposed in Northern Ireland, from Home Rule to Brexit deals and beyond, they're their own worst enemy. I am not remotely interested in protecting people whose identity is based on that level of intolerance.
Do they care? As they have proved over the decades and indeed centuries Protestant Ulster men are willing to fight to protect their culture.
Given the IRA bombed their way to Irish independence and the GFA and powersharing, why would not Protestant loyalist paramilitaries do the same to protect their homeland if they have to?
Because they don't have a leg to stand on.
"We want to unite with Ireland" when Ireland says they want to be united too, is an achievable objective.
"We want to stay with the UK" when the UK says "goodbye" is not.
England says "Ireland is united, we're having nothing to do with NI anymore" then the Protestant Ulstermen can't do anything to make Westminster change its mind. The equivalent would have required Dublin to say "we'll never accept NI even if it leaves the UK" but that never happened.
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Agreed, the taxpayer is on for a shafting no matter what happens. Better to let he finance boys share the problem and make them take their responsibilities seriously.
There is absolutely no reason to shaft the taxpayers. The underlying business, without debt, is profitable.
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem. Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
Exactly.
Managed bankruptcy for public ltd is exactly about this. The debt is killed off in order of seniority until the ship refloats.
What the government needs to do is to legislate to cover the debts to suppliers itself. As a loan to Thames Water. At a suitable interest rate. At the highest seniority.
So during the bankruptcy, there is no pressure on the supply chain. So they will happily carry on supplying pipe, valves etc.
Once the bankruptcy is resolved, the refloated (ha!) company will be able to pay the government back. Trivially. It will be a month or two of supply costs, at most.
Does it even need to legislate? If Thames goes into administration, there's an awful lot of the company that either couldn't be sold off or is so heavily regulated that it couldn't be put to some other use or prices hiked excessively. The company would, however, still have legal obligations so any administration would still need to set aside income for such necessary spending as is needed to deliver on those obligations - or is that the unusual circumstance here that's isn't covered by existing law on bankruptcies?
Comments
You mention farming - which jobs have replaced the people who used to work in farming? A lot of townie types (hi) now living rurally and doing service type jobs with computers. Take those away and...? Its like replacing coal mining jobs with warehousing - "there are jobs" say the people who don't live there. But the community remains hollowed out.
The parameters it uses are carefully couched - it tries to disarm the argument that a lot of “milliknaires” are people who own property by giving a figure used of £1m in liquid assets
The thing is that it isn’t people with £1-2m liquid assets leaving, it’s the people with £100m and more.
These people are a huge loss to the UK economy, and it’s tedious to have to go over this for the millionth time here - every single one of the millionaires, and billionaires leaving, are people who, despite paying lower % rates through planning, still contribute absolute shit loads of tax directly and indirectly to the UK economy.
Normal direct taxes plus VAT on the vast amounts of things they buy. Taxes on the staff and services they employ etc etc.
They are also the people who would be setting up multiple businesses in the UK which they now won’t.
I cannot without doxxing myself explain to you how f-ing annoying this blindness is on here and tell you who is leaving the UK and their wealth.
I am directly and indirectly involved with many many who have just and are in the process of leaving the UK and the total wealth is billions. They are all setting up and or moving businesses.
This is just one small jurisdiction.
Inevitably this will receive the same responses that these people can leave if they don’t want to pay their taxes - you are losing crazy amounts of tax and so much new business and growth and entrepreneurs on top of new industries.
This is all money and future growth you have lost because prejudices will not allow you to say “maybe it’s better we make the country attractive to the wealthy so we get a bit of their money rather than tell them we hate them and have none of their money”.
We are losing high net worth people and their taxes. So who pays what we lose from them ? A wealth tax as they advocate ?
https://www.devere-group.com/why-are-millionaires-leaving-the-uk/
A massive structural weakness in the British economy is that output per worker is so low. Millions of people are trapped in jobs that don't pay their bills and offer them no opportunities to grow and develop.
How can we empower people to work more productively? Allow them to do the work that they want to do - especially as AI threatens so many whole sectors of employment we have today. You can't change job because you are an economic slave - but what if you weren't? Pay everyone a basic income and suddenly those choices are freed up, those opportunities made possible.
I sound like Farage when I say that part of it is paid for by rolling most high cost to serve welfare into it (bye bye UC etc) and partly by unlocking productivity and therefore economic output.
My point is that the status quo is broken and we need to stop with the fallacy that we can cut our way to growth. Cut spending on police and pay for more crime. Cut spending on preventative health and pay for more emergency health. Prevention is always cheaper and yet we can't afford police officers and teachers apparently.
Govt bringing forward plans to allow these trials in Spring 2026.
Wouldn’t like a career as a cab driver. Uber drivers have been complaining about fares recently. They’ll all be out of a job in five years, the Luddite cabbies could rise up and smash the taxis for taking their jobs.
Is bosh the new cripes?
Only the ultra sophisticated world city of London can possibly know.
Too high brow for us provincials.
The great transfer of jobs away from agricultural happened in the 19th century because of the industrial revolution and further speeded up by the Agricultural Depression of the 1870s. They left the land to go to cities to work in factories. Now those jobs have gone in turn.
Hammers fan, too. Forgot to add that.
RoI is looking well doshed up atm but if Trump gets in to gear its financially screwed. US tax dodgers are the mainstay of the economy.
It's best chance is to negotiate with Starmer in power as he couldnt run a negotiation without handing zillions away.
Thomas Skinner ⚒
@iamtomskinner
·
9 Jun
If you’re reading this…
You are perfect, you are enough, and you are loved.
Never forget it. Keep going. You’ve got this. ❤️💪
Bosh❤️
Imagine you run a widget factory, employing 100 people. Unfortunately, there is a downturn in the widgets market, sales drop, and so you lay 25 workers off. The system sees you making people redundant, and so you get hit by the robot tax. You shed more staff to try and control costs, and the robot tax increases. Go round that cycle a couple of times, and eventually you've no staff, no income, but presumably a massive tax bill.
Essentially it would destroy any business that needed to lay off staff for any reason other than productivity gains.
In that scenario no party would ever get elected again without promising a UBI funded by a robot tax on every corporation using AI
Anyway, here he is feasting on pie and mash with Nick Love and Danny Dyer.
Cockney overload
https://x.com/iamtomskinner/status/1891499371922936169?s=61
Surely scrutinising Reform day in, day out until the election is good? Frankly a bit more scrutiny of the Ming Vase might have been good last year,
Put Thames Water into temporary state control, ‘junior’ creditors will argue
£5bn rescue plan would set ‘troubling precedent’, bondholders who face losing all of their money will say
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/10/thames-water-state-control-creditors-rescue-plan
Just say no.
The notional increase in public borrowing by taking the company into state ownership via administration is economically irrelevant.
Either way we'll be paying for it. We should at least take the assets in return.
Where have you been for the past decade? Identity trumps economics.
Decline in Asian birth rates are one of the most surprising things of my lifetime.
A maternity hospital, along with other buildings, is on fire in Odesa following a Russian drone strike.
https://x.com/BohuslavskaKate/status/1932211831034249559
But if the RoI gets hit with an economic pasting from Trump irredentism will take a back seat.
Alternatively Farage took over the xenophobe mantle very soon after, though the disinfectant of sunlight of dozens of QT appearances didn't seem to harm his bubble in the slightest.
It’s a near worldwide phenomenon and no one has a single good explanation
But it’s not QUITE worldwide
https://thespectator.com/life/optimism-younger-countries-central-asia/
It's the regular, uncritical tameness that stands out, though.
Consider a work colleague - he’s a first generation Indian immigrant. Applying for citizenship etc. He’s been here 5 years.
If life looks better in Germany, why shouldn’t he leave?
That appears to suggest that huge amounts of coverage was based on "research" from a company whose business is to encourage rich people to move to different countries. The initial research is essentially advertising, disguised as "news".
The key takeaway for me was the line...
In 2021, Henley described 2000 millionaires leaving the UK as “insignificant” but in 2023 described 1600 millionaires leaving the UK an “exodus”.
They appear to put out regular "research", which mean very little beyond what is likely to generate the most mentions of their name at the time they send out the press releases.
It really makes the tiniest of any negative difference to 99% of the population if you set a special tax incentive to attract in the hugely wealthy - not only will you get tax that you didn’t have before, even if not at normal % rate, but you will get their spending on goods and services which employs more people and generate tax and spend from those people too.
And guess what, they might think it’s worth setting up an arm of their business in the country that they live in and makes them feel welcome. Which will add to growth and tax.
The resistance is one of stupidity or envy - we can tax these suckers dry, what are they going to do/not fair these people have so much more than me so heat we punish them.
They’re criticising, implicitly, Henley for their research driven by an agenda. They’re no different.
When I used to go to Graz for work plenty of Bosnians there.
"America’s philosophical civil war
Both sides are full of contradiction"
https://unherd.com/2025/06/americas-philosophical-civil-war/
The problem is the debt. That problem is owned by the bondholders.
Owe the bank £1 000 you can't repay? You have a problem.
Owe the bank £1 000 000 000 you can't repay? The bank has a problem.
If the bondholders want to avoid being wiped out they need to act accordingly and accept a haircut on their bad debts. Then the business can survive.
Or they can go into administration and the bondholders can lose everything.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
People are behind the curve. Farage needed to get the support of populist voters and he has. He has clearly moved to the socially conservative centre ground of the broad social democrat consensus, with the addition of a strong closed borders policy. He doesn't have policies that will frighten the horses. He has to survive several years with curently a strong support base, the other parties very feeble and Reform having a very fragile leadership team.
The great need is for Lab/Tory and LD to get their narrative skills up to speed, and tell a much better story than Farage does. And appear more competent and more confident about the electorate.
We have firms who want to hire people below the market rate for wages.
If you can't fill a vacancy, you aren't paying enough.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp92edelzero
https://www.ft.com/content/2b23f42d-0d62-4f11-b4d7-251b7a8252a8
Frankly, from their oppositionist attitude to just about everything ever proposed in Northern Ireland, from Home Rule to Brexit deals and beyond, they're their own worst enemy. I am not remotely interested in protecting people whose identity is based on that level of intolerance.
Hence globally Muslims have the highest birthrate, then evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews, then Roman Catholics then mainline Protestants and Hindus and liberal Jews and last atheists
Managed bankruptcy for public ltd is exactly about this. The debt is killed off in order of seniority until the ship refloats.
What the government needs to do is to legislate to cover the debts to suppliers itself. As a loan to Thames Water. At a suitable interest rate. At the highest seniority.
So during the bankruptcy, there is no pressure on the supply chain. So they will happily carry on supplying pipe, valves etc.
Once the bankruptcy is resolved, the refloated (ha!) company will be able to pay the government back. Trivially. It will be a month or two of supply costs, at most.
https://www.seashepherdglobal.org/latest-news/slaughter-dolphins-faroes/
In NI the police are strictly constrained *not to investigate* certain crimes because of this.
The face eating leopards were carefully fed and encouraged when they ate faces. As long as they ate faces according to certain rules.
Now we are supposed to be surprised about all the face eating leopards who feel entitled.
I'd also assume there is a lot of research, and a quick Google search suggests a huge range of sources. Curiously, all the ones on the first page (for me), which reference an exodus, ultimately went back to Henley press releases. It took about 5 clicks through different people quoting each other in some cases, but I've got to admit I was surprised at just how successful their "research" worm has wriggled across the internet.
Must admit I've always wanted to go there. A stop was scheduled on a cruise to Iceland once, but the ship developed engine problems and had to cut out several ports of call. Quite annoying.
*this revised opinion has nothing to do with the fact my entire trip is being funded by Faroese Tourism, Inc
I have a hypothesis: that low birth rates are an inherent feature of a) top-heavy population pyramids, and b) rapidly aging populations. This is because, whatever the set-up of the society, the older a population is and the faster it ages, the more resources have to be expended on the old, so the fewer resources are available for the young. So the young end up without the means to afford the bare minimum they perceive that they require in order to breed (largely, a big enough house, but also the time resources to bring up the child). This is true whether those resources are state resources or individual resources; and whether those resources are money or time or effort.
When I've tried to explain this hypothesis to people in the past, they've tended to dismiss it by reference to their own example ("well our decision to have children was nothing to do with the presence of grandparents*"), but averaged over a whole society I think there might be something in it. Not least because it is a common feature of all societies with dropping birth rates.
There's something in all this about relative standards of living between children and parents, but I think there's something to work with there.
*Actually, to generalise from myself: we'd have always had a first child if we could - and, being reasonably well-off, a second - but we almost certainly wouldn't have had a third were it not for an inheritance a couple of years previously, which had enabled us to buy a house with a bedroom in which to put said child...
I also wonder how much of it is simply brought on by necessity. The steelworks of Port Talbot and Scunthorpe cannot exist without Government support of some sort, but that’s not their fault, it's the fault of wretched short-sighted policies over many years. A lot of Reform's recommendations seem to be a last ditch attempt to save these capabilities, rather than committed social democracy.
Either way, I would like (and I think it's more possible now than ever before) to have two party politics with Reform on the left and the Tories on the right. A small state sound money Gladstonian party (Tories) vs. a more interventionist but still very patriotic party (Reform), would rid us of the corrosive effect of the anti-British decision makers who have been running the show for many decades.
What were the odds of us getting both such a sale and such a promotion days before they both end?
Had we not got it then, we'd have had to have acted now where there's a sale on and a promotion to get 4 years interest free credit.
Given the IRA bombed their way to Irish independence and the GFA and powersharing, why would not Protestant loyalist paramilitaries do the same to protect their homeland if they have to?
The continent was redefined by Schengen
Sean Thomas" (£)
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-schengen-divided-europe/
Though a small Conservative party on the lines you describe could still survive, especially if we have PR, alongside a slightly bigger left of centre Labour party still representing the public sector and students
"We want to unite with Ireland" when Ireland says they want to be united too, is an achievable objective.
"We want to stay with the UK" when the UK says "goodbye" is not.
England says "Ireland is united, we're having nothing to do with NI anymore" then the Protestant Ulstermen can't do anything to make Westminster change its mind. The equivalent would have required Dublin to say "we'll never accept NI even if it leaves the UK" but that never happened.