I'm going to put £20 on Emma winning the tournament as soon as poss.
And you will lose your money. She won in NY in a weird set of circs, and she is at best a top 20 player, not a top 5. She will never win another slam.
I agree. I would expect to lose the money but it just makes the tournament more interesting for a while.
I'd put it on Jiri Lehecka (runner up at Queens). Bang in form on grass.
Winner at Queens for my trusty pin, Tatjana Maria at 200/1. The ladies' tournament looks more open than the gentlemen's so sensible punters will concentrate on the chaps.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
Ben Habibs new party launched this morning - Advance UK, 1000 initial members apparently. However Rupert Lowe is not joining him, he will remain an indy and is launching an initiative called Restore UK which is not a party but he says an attempt at collaborative efforts etc etc. Reform splitters have split
Another one, (FFS)?
I want someone to launch the Re: Actionary Party.
The one I want to see is Retreat UK.
We won't achieve Dutch levels of fragmentation until we get incomprehensible names like L25 or Article 10.
Having had an initial look at them, looks like Ben is trying to get 30,000 members at a discounted annual rate of a tenner at which point he will invest 100,000 pounds and register formally with the Electoral Commission. I think hes looking to hit the campaign trail with an already sizeable party..... I can see him hitting 10,000 but 30,000 is a stretch, unless there are a lot of Reformers looking for something new. And how do you keep a new party with no representatives in the public eye?
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
Yes because it is not as if the banking system is deeply integrated into the wider economy. Obviously wages would be paid as normal and trade payments and receipts continue without banks. Or would they?
The trouble with simplistic ‘rescue X and let Y die’ solutions is the whole system is interlocked in unknown and probably unknowable ways.
The fear of systemic risk argument looks much weaker after covid. The government has the power to just do things.
But that's the point. The government did 'do things'. In both cases (GFC and Covid) they chose to do things to avoid a collapse (financial system, NHS, economy) rather than allow it and do things to try and mitigate its impact.
The reason for this is the consequences of the latter course were potentially catastrophic and impossible to model with any semblance of confidence. It would have been an unconscionable risk to take. They had no realistic alternative. Lab and Con alike, they did their duty.
It was impossible to model the effects of declaring war on Germany in 1939, so using that logic it was an unconscionable risk not to continue the policy of appeasement.
There's no blanket implication that if you can't model something you should never do it. It's about the balance of risk and consequences between alternatives. Your example is no exemption to this.
Sorry to bang on about this but - this key question that the bereaved want answered - "There are key questions families and care staff want answered - including why the decision was made in March 2020 to rapidly discharge some hospital patients into care homes."
I can tell them - the powers that be thought that hospitals were going to be over run. Job done, can I have my millions please?
FFS
And that assumption was based on hopeless modelling driven by the likes of the useless Ferguson..💩
No. It was based on the assumption that patients not actually ill were not infectious. Sadly that assumption was false.
It was very clear at the time that they were discharging infected individuals into care homes. The results were fairly predictable.
I'm going to put £20 on Emma winning the tournament as soon as poss.
And you will lose your money. She won in NY in a weird set of circs, and she is at best a top 20 player, not a top 5. She will never win another slam.
Probably true, but good luck to her. She took her chance, even if it never happens again, when it arose. If she never wins anything major again, she will still go down in history, like Bob Massie (16 for 137 at Lord's in 1972, didn't ever do much again, gosh was that 53 years ago seems like yesterday), she will still have the winning combination of being pretty, nice and clever, and will be a few million pounds better off.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
Not sure what has happened to that link but in 2010 Osborne inherited a current account deficit of 7.29% of GDP. This fell every year until in 2019 they were in surplus by a tiny margin. Of course, we then had a change of government and Covid but the Coalition/Cameron government was extremely successful in bringing our books back into balance.
Under Major and then Blair the deficit from the 90s recession peaked at 5.58% in 1994, and then fell to 0.55% four years later in 1998, a reduction of 5pp.
After the Great Financial Crash, the deficit peaked at 7.29% in 2010. Four years later it stood at 4.29%, a reduction of 3pp.
I cannot rate the performance of Cameron/Coalition as being extremely successful. They fecked it up and the deficit came down much more slowly than it ought to have done.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
Adam Curtis, in discussion with Russell Brand about "Hypernormalisation". For those who cannot stand Russell Brand, here is a video with Brand edited out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI&t=1550s
This is why Starmer should not be Prime Minister. Without an inner core he cannot cope with the chaos of the world. He does not have the qualities necessary for the job.
Regrettably Adam Curtis has slightly gone down in my estimation after he put falsehoods into his latest documentary, which were pointed out recently by the BBC's More Or Less radio programme (and Prof John Curtice). Curtis admitted to the mistakes when they were pointed out. The main one was saying Thatcher was behind during the 1979 election campaign until she made an immigration speech, both not true.
I gave up on Curtis's latest. The crowbarring in of his personal views on Thatcherism was so obvious and so jarring. The Crown did it all better.
This is the problem that the creation of Retard UK has. There is a very significant amount of votes to play for but they are all coalesced around the Nigel. Until he fails I can't see how any of the populist people's front splitters will do any better than their Scottish cousins (Alba)
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
Retard UK, you say?
I'm also mindful of Selena Meyer forgetting the three Rs of her migration policy and making up Repel as one of them.
Someone needs to do the Repel Party. Your happy place where we're in favour of traditional British culture and values and that means drowning the darkies in the channel or shooting them if they float.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
Yes because it is not as if the banking system is deeply integrated into the wider economy. Obviously wages would be paid as normal and trade payments and receipts continue without banks. Or would they?
The trouble with simplistic ‘rescue X and let Y die’ solutions is the whole system is interlocked in unknown and probably unknowable ways.
The fear of systemic risk argument looks much weaker after covid. The government has the power to just do things.
But that's the point. The government did 'do things'. In both cases (GFC and Covid) they chose to do things to avoid a collapse (financial system, NHS, economy) rather than allow it and do things to try and mitigate its impact.
The reason for this is the consequences of the latter course were potentially catastrophic and impossible to model with any semblance of confidence. It would have been an unconscionable risk to take. They had no realistic alternative. Lab and Con alike, they did their duty.
It was impossible to model the effects of declaring war on Germany in 1939, so using that logic it was an unconscionable risk not to continue the policy of appeasement.
I'm not sure kinabalu would disagree with that assessment.
Oi! Rather silly comment and a tad odious. Suggest you stick to the ladybird economics.
I think lots of surveys have shown that, on average in Britain, people have one fewer child than they want. It's not right-wing to help people achieve their aspirations. It's fundamental to democratic politics.
How you go about doing that could be more or less right or left wing, of course.
I am fed up with the prominence of the 'Bereaved families' in the proceedings. Yes they suffered loss. Yes it was horrific, yes mistakes were made but this isn't a coroner's inquest for your granny.
But the enquiry should not be about that - we need to plan ahead, stop things happening again. The bereaved are set on persuing blame, and every witness is coming to the stand to defend their actions. We needed a truth and reconciliation not a witch hunt.
And we should be examining the rest of the world to see what worked best (a far better track and trace, early wearing of face masks and a better compliant population as in SE Asia.)
Actually I disagree with quite a lot of that.
Track and trace - as understood from the pandemic - is rendered almost entirely obsolete by technology since developed.
The availability of cheap instant sequencing in the field, along with lateral flow tests that can be performed at home, and wastewater surveillance, mean a whole different set of plans are needed for the future.
Add in the knowledge and capacity for rapid vaccine development, and we're in a very different world.
In effect, we were blundering around in the dark compared to where we are now, and many of the lessons to be drawn are largely if historic interest.
I'm going to put £20 on Emma winning the tournament as soon as poss.
And you will lose your money. She won in NY in a weird set of circs, and she is at best a top 20 player, not a top 5. She will never win another slam.
I agree. I would expect to lose the money but it just makes the tournament more interesting for a while.
I'd put it on Jiri Lehecka (runner up at Queens). Bang in form on grass.
Winner at Queens for my trusty pin, Tatjana Maria at 200/1. The ladies' tournament looks more open than the gentlemen's so sensible punters will concentrate on the chaps.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
We really need the Magic Grandpa party and a few more lefty splinter groups to rebalance a bit. Otherwise we'll have to retire that old trope about the left being divided!
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
You're missing the point again. Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
Adam Curtis, in discussion with Russell Brand about "Hypernormalisation". For those who cannot stand Russell Brand, here is a video with Brand edited out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI&t=1550s
This is why Starmer should not be Prime Minister. Without an inner core he cannot cope with the chaos of the world. He does not have the qualities necessary for the job.
Regrettably Adam Curtis has slightly gone down in my estimation after he put falsehoods into his latest documentary, which were pointed out recently by the BBC's More Or Less radio programme (and Prof John Curtice). Curtis admitted to the mistakes when they were pointed out. The main one was saying Thatcher was behind during the 1979 election campaign until she made an immigration speech, both not true.
I gave up on Curtis's latest. The crowbarring in of his personal views on Thatcherism was so obvious and so jarring. The Crown did it all better.
His stuff tends to be impressionistic. I think that MO is a good complement to the more traditional facts and figures approach - which in any case is rife with cherry picking and the bias of the presenter/debater.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
Retard UK, you say?
I'm also mindful of Selena Meyer forgetting the three Rs of her migration policy and making up Repel as one of them.
Someone needs to do the Repel Party. Your happy place where we're in favour of traditional British culture and values and that means drowning the darkies in the channel or shooting them if they float.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
Because - unlike various others including some leading LibDems, the Tories weren't calling for tighter regulation nor warning about the dangers ahead, but actually criticising the existing level of regulation and calling for deregulation
That's such a simplistic analysis. There isn't a linear sliding scale where more regulation = good and less regulation = bad. It's possible to overlook systemic issues while also having a regulatory burden that is too big.
Nothing the Tories were calling for back then would have done anything to help, or ameliorate the damage, for sure.
I can't see any sense at all in which the belief that more babies are a good thing, when the current rate is well below replacement level, is either right or left or any other wing. It reflects humanism and hope about the human condition. To want there to be lots of children and for them to flourish is a naturally occurring human trait. The job of government is to not get in the way of this excellent quality.
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
We really need the Magic Grandpa party and a few more lefty splinter groups to rebalance a bit. Otherwise we'll have to retire that old trope about the left being divided!
Some centre splits too please - Orange Bookers on Hobby Horses UK, Lembit Opiks Cheeky Britain, Tim Farrons Faith Britain, Jo Swinson's Menzies UK army, The Liberal Democrats, Chris Huhne Points The Way
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I suspect they looked at that, had a think about how much was involved in guaranteeing 100% of customer deposits when it actually had to be done, and decided that the course they took, while immoral and terrible, was less immoral and terrible than all the others. The knock on effects of all banks and deposit takers going under at the same time are not really possible to calculate.
The heart of the matter is elsewhere. Deposit takers were then and still are under massive government regulation. That regulation, as well as the banks themselves, failed to manage risk properly.
Once you move away from the Victorian age 'caveat emptor' then government has no choice but to take responsibility.
Nonsense, depositors are made senior creditors, subordinating all bondholders, employees and HMRC. The government provides liquidity while bank assets are sold to pay the state back for the immediate liquidity to ensure depositors are protected.
I think the calculation was, shit these two big Scottish banks are about to go under, the PM and Chancellor are Scottish and this is going to be hugely embarrassing for them so bail one out and force Lloyds down the aisle with HBOS.
Max, last bit is pure bollox, dumping those two would have wrecked the country totally.
Not really, a liquidity mechanism to insure depositors against losses and recouping that from asset sales post bankruptcy would have left the shareholders and bondholders with gigantic losses for sure and an immediate repricing of risk. It's the same politics as pushing Aberdeen and Standard Life together which has ended in utter failure. The politicians were looking after themselves and ignored the consequences of bailing out private corporations and putting the taxpayer on the hook for their stupid business models. They didn't go bankrupt because they were Scottish, but them being Scottish was, IMO, the ultimate reason the Scottish PM and Scottish chancellor stepped in to save them. Forget all economic arguments, the political fallout for them personally in their own seats would have been catastrophic to let Scotland's two major financial champions go bankrupt.
I am fed up with the prominence of the 'Bereaved families' in the proceedings. Yes they suffered loss. Yes it was horrific, yes mistakes were made but this isn't a coroner's inquest for your granny.
But the enquiry should not be about that - we need to plan ahead, stop things happening again. The bereaved are set on persuing blame, and every witness is coming to the stand to defend their actions. We needed a truth and reconciliation not a witch hunt.
And we should be examining the rest of the world to see what worked best (a far better track and trace, early wearing of face masks and a better compliant population as in SE Asia.)
That is not the sort of inquiry that the COVID-19 Inquiry was set up to be (by Johnson). But it is an area that has attracted considerable academic research, so the answers are out there. (For example, there's this special issue: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/health-policy/vol/126/issue/5 ) I don't know that we need an inquiry to answer those things.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
Retard UK, you say?
I'm also mindful of Selena Meyer forgetting the three Rs of her migration policy and making up Repel as one of them.
Someone needs to do the Repel Party. Your happy place where we're in favour of traditional British culture and values and that means drowning the darkies in the channel or shooting them if they float.
'The Repulse Party' would be better.
Better still, have both. Then we could have the Repellents vs the Repulsives.
I am fed up with the prominence of the 'Bereaved families' in the proceedings. Yes they suffered loss. Yes it was horrific, yes mistakes were made but this isn't a coroner's inquest for your granny.
But the enquiry should not be about that - we need to plan ahead, stop things happening again. The bereaved are set on persuing blame, and every witness is coming to the stand to defend their actions. We needed a truth and reconciliation not a witch hunt.
And we should be examining the rest of the world to see what worked best (a far better track and trace, early wearing of face masks and a better compliant population as in SE Asia.)
Actually I disagree with quite a lot of that.
Track and trace - as understood from the pandemic - is rendered almost entirely obsolete by technology since developed.
The availability of cheap instant sequencing in the field, along with lateral flow tests that can be performed at home, and wastewater surveillance, mean a whole different set of plans are needed for the future.
Add in the knowledge and capacity for rapid vaccine development, and we're in a very different world.
In effect, we were blundering around in the dark compared to where we are now, and many of the lessons to be drawn are largely if historic interest.
I feel that often (perhaps mostly) the actual real world point of these public inquiries into scandals and disasters is not to achieve the much mocked 'learning of lessons' but to give victims their moment, a platform for their voice, so they can feel what they have suffered counts for something. That they matter.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
We really need the Magic Grandpa party and a few more lefty splinter groups to rebalance a bit. Otherwise we'll have to retire that old trope about the left being divided!
Some centre splits too please - Orange Bookers on Hobby Horses UK, Lembit Opiks Cheeky Britain, Tim Farrons Faith Britain, Jo Swinson's Menzies UK army, The Liberal Democrats, Chris Huhne Points The Way
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
I'm sure you've missed loads. Aren't the English Democrats still going? They received 5,182 votes at GE2024.
Then there's the British Democratic Party. They received more votes than Gina Miller's party.
There are more too, but I don't have the time or inclination to list them all.
Sadiq khan confirms he is still against the Welfare Bill as it stands. Alongside the 150,000 into poverty chances of government defeat rising again. A ministerial level resignation this evening might be enough to tip the scales? Labour probably have to deploy the three line whip and have the balls to suspend 40 or so MPs
I think lots of surveys have shown that, on average in Britain, people have one fewer child than they want. It's not right-wing to help people achieve their aspirations. It's fundamental to democratic politics.
How you go about doing that could be more or less right or left wing, of course.
Less immigration, bigger houses, lower housing costs, lower childcare costs (start the school year effectively from age 1). Oh and fully transferrable household tax allowances so families who have a stay at home parent are able to benefit from that and a single income earner can support a family of four if they make lifestyle sacrifices.
Controversially a refundable property tax payable by retired people would force many to downsize as well, freeing up larger family homes. Refundable up to five years backdated from the national retirement age.
I can't see any sense at all in which the belief that more babies are a good thing, when the current rate is well below replacement level, is either right or left or any other wing. It reflects humanism and hope about the human condition. To want there to be lots of children and for them to flourish is a naturally occurring human trait. The job of government is to not get in the way of this excellent quality.
The problem is that the question becomes wrapped up in the politics of feels.
See the Lucy Letby appeal/questioning the conviction. A coalition of people (see some posters here) grabbed the issue for their side in the culture war.
The sane answer was that some interesting questions had been raised and that an appeal was not impossible. Yet you had people, who were apparently progressive, channeling Lord Denning.
I am fed up with the prominence of the 'Bereaved families' in the proceedings. Yes they suffered loss. Yes it was horrific, yes mistakes were made but this isn't a coroner's inquest for your granny.
But the enquiry should not be about that - we need to plan ahead, stop things happening again. The bereaved are set on persuing blame, and every witness is coming to the stand to defend their actions. We needed a truth and reconciliation not a witch hunt.
And we should be examining the rest of the world to see what worked best (a far better track and trace, early wearing of face masks and a better compliant population as in SE Asia.)
Actually I disagree with quite a lot of that.
Track and trace - as understood from the pandemic - is rendered almost entirely obsolete by technology since developed.
The availability of cheap instant sequencing in the field, along with lateral flow tests that can be performed at home, and wastewater surveillance, mean a whole different set of plans are needed for the future.
Add in the knowledge and capacity for rapid vaccine development, and we're in a very different world.
In effect, we were blundering around in the dark compared to where we are now, and many of the lessons to be drawn are largely if historic interest.
I feel that often (perhaps mostly) the actual real world point of these public inquiries into scandals and disasters is not to achieve the much mocked 'learning of lessons' but to give victims their moment, a platform for their voice, so they can feel what they have suffered counts for something. That they matter.
FWIW, I made my feeling about the discharge of infected patients into care homes very clear at the time. I've very little interest of it all being rehashed at great public expense, and it's likely to be a repetition of the same arguments and dubious justifications all over again.
Ben Habibs new party launched this morning - Advance UK, 1000 initial members apparently. However Rupert Lowe is not joining him, he will remain an indy and is launching an initiative called Restore UK which is not a party but he says an attempt at collaborative efforts etc etc. Reform splitters have split
Another one, (FFS)?
I want someone to launch the Re: Actionary Party.
The one I want to see is Retreat UK.
We won't achieve Dutch levels of fragmentation until we get incomprehensible names like L25 or Article 10.
Having had an initial look at them, looks like Ben is trying to get 30,000 members at a discounted annual rate of a tenner at which point he will invest 100,000 pounds and register formally with the Electoral Commission. I think hes looking to hit the campaign trail with an already sizeable party..... I can see him hitting 10,000 but 30,000 is a stretch, unless there are a lot of Reformers looking for something new. And how do you keep a new party with no representatives in the public eye?
Farage has managed it several times with his BBC fanbois.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
You're missing the point again. Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
We absolutely could have done the same.
Iceland honoured their legal obligations and let anyone who wasn't legally protected face the consequences.
We chose not to.
That was a political choice, not an economic necessity.
Iceland did have to worry about downstream consequences, but they worried about the ones they were legally obliged to do so, rather than protecting them all. We chose not to, but we had no reason why we couldn't have done the same as them.
Not all UK banks depositors were British citizens either, just like the Icelandic ones.
I am fed up with the prominence of the 'Bereaved families' in the proceedings. Yes they suffered loss. Yes it was horrific, yes mistakes were made but this isn't a coroner's inquest for your granny.
But the enquiry should not be about that - we need to plan ahead, stop things happening again. The bereaved are set on persuing blame, and every witness is coming to the stand to defend their actions. We needed a truth and reconciliation not a witch hunt.
And we should be examining the rest of the world to see what worked best (a far better track and trace, early wearing of face masks and a better compliant population as in SE Asia.)
Actually I disagree with quite a lot of that.
Track and trace - as understood from the pandemic - is rendered almost entirely obsolete by technology since developed.
The availability of cheap instant sequencing in the field, along with lateral flow tests that can be performed at home, and wastewater surveillance, mean a whole different set of plans are needed for the future.
Add in the knowledge and capacity for rapid vaccine development, and we're in a very different world.
In effect, we were blundering around in the dark compared to where we are now, and many of the lessons to be drawn are largely if historic interest.
I feel that often (perhaps mostly) the actual real world point of these public inquiries into scandals and disasters is not to achieve the much mocked 'learning of lessons' but to give victims their moment, a platform for their voice, so they can feel what they have suffered counts for something. That they matter.
FWIW, I made my feeling about the discharge of infected patients into care homes very clear at the time. I've very little interest of it all being rehashed at great public expense, and it's likely to be a repetition of the same arguments and dubious justifications all over again.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
Retard UK, you say?
I'm also mindful of Selena Meyer forgetting the three Rs of her migration policy and making up Repel as one of them.
Someone needs to do the Repel Party. Your happy place where we're in favour of traditional British culture and values and that means drowning the darkies in the channel or shooting them if they float.
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
I'm sure you've missed loads. Aren't the English Democrats still going? They received 5,182 votes at GE2024.
Then there's the British Democratic Party. They received more votes than Gina Miller's party.
There are more too, but I don't have the time or inclination to list them all.
There's also Heritage, David Kurten's (vanity) project after he left UKIP. There's Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party in Wales, another UKIP spin-off, and the Scottish Family Party in Scotland. There's Democrats and Veterans, again a UKIP spin-off; they actually managed to win 2 council seats. There's the Homeland Party, more full on fascists.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
You're missing the point again. Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
We absolutely could have done the same.
Iceland honoured their legal obligations and let anyone who wasn't legally protected face the consequences.
We chose not to.
That was a political choice, not an economic necessity.
Iceland did have to worry about downstream consequences, but they worried about the ones they were legally obliged to do so, rather than protecting them all. We chose not to, but we had no reason why we couldn't have done the same as them.
Not all UK banks depositors were British citizens either, just like the Icelandic ones.
And saw unemployment soar in Iceland, its currency's value halve and its stock market effectively wiped out
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
I'm sure you've missed loads. Aren't the English Democrats still going? They received 5,182 votes at GE2024.
Then there's the British Democratic Party. They received more votes than Gina Miller's party.
There are more too, but I don't have the time or inclination to list them all.
There's also Heritage, David Kurten's (vanity) project after he left UKIP. There's Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party in Wales, another UKIP spin-off, and the Scottish Family Party in Scotland. There's Democrats and Veterans, again a UKIP spin-off; they actually managed to win 2 council seats. There's the Homeland Party, more full on fascists.
If we are includimg anti 'woke' theres Posie Parkers Party of Women
There are more UKIP spin offs than remaining Kipper members
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
Because - unlike various others including some leading LibDems, the Tories weren't calling for tighter regulation nor warning about the dangers ahead, but actually criticising the existing level of regulation and calling for deregulation
That's such a simplistic analysis. There isn't a linear sliding scale where more regulation = good and less regulation = bad. It's possible to overlook systemic issues while also having a regulatory burden that is too big.
Nothing the Tories were calling for back then would have done anything to help, or ameliorate the damage, for sure.
The counterfactual is a continuity Major-Clarke goverment so that's irrelevant, even if true.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
You're missing the point again. Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
We absolutely could have done the same.
Iceland honoured their legal obligations and let anyone who wasn't legally protected face the consequences.
We chose not to.
That was a political choice, not an economic necessity.
Iceland did have to worry about downstream consequences, but they worried about the ones they were legally obliged to do so, rather than protecting them all. We chose not to, but we had no reason why we couldn't have done the same as them.
Not all UK banks depositors were British citizens either, just like the Icelandic ones.
And saw unemployment soar in Iceland, its currency's value halve and its stock market effectively wiped out
Actions have consequences and giving the bankers at RBS and HBOS a consequence free outcome for their failures has been worse than any of those short term issues we may have faced.
I can't see any sense at all in which the belief that more babies are a good thing, when the current rate is well below replacement level, is either right or left or any other wing. It reflects humanism and hope about the human condition. To want there to be lots of children and for them to flourish is a naturally occurring human trait. The job of government is to not get in the way of this excellent quality.
The problem is that the question becomes wrapped up in the politics of feels.
See the Lucy Letby appeal/questioning the conviction. A coalition of people (see some posters here) grabbed the issue for their side in the culture war.
The sane answer was that some interesting questions had been raised and that an appeal was not impossible. Yet you had people, who were apparently progressive, channeling Lord Denning.
Yes. Maybe a job for PB is to unwrap it again, and try very hard to see things how they are beyond labels and slogans. In particular not to think that using terms like 'left' and 'right' have useful meanings without elucidation.
The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are."
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
You're missing the point again. Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
We absolutely could have done the same.
Iceland honoured their legal obligations and let anyone who wasn't legally protected face the consequences.
We chose not to.
That was a political choice, not an economic necessity.
Iceland did have to worry about downstream consequences, but they worried about the ones they were legally obliged to do so, rather than protecting them all. We chose not to, but we had no reason why we couldn't have done the same as them.
Not all UK banks depositors were British citizens either, just like the Icelandic ones.
And saw unemployment soar in Iceland, its currency's value halve and its stock market effectively wiped out
Actions have consequences and giving the bankers at RBS and HBOS a consequence free outcome for their failures has been worse than any of those short term issues we may have faced.
It wasn't consequence free, Goodwin saw his pension halved, lost his job and knighthood.
However it would be those extra unemployed who would have suffered far more than the likes of him
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
Because - unlike various others including some leading LibDems, the Tories weren't calling for tighter regulation nor warning about the dangers ahead, but actually criticising the existing level of regulation and calling for deregulation
That's such a simplistic analysis. There isn't a linear sliding scale where more regulation = good and less regulation = bad. It's possible to overlook systemic issues while also having a regulatory burden that is too big.
Nothing the Tories were calling for back then would have done anything to help, or ameliorate the damage, for sure.
The counterfactual is a continuity Major-Clarke goverment so that's irrelevant, even if true.
There's two things:
1) GFC, which, Britain certainly played it's part in. 2) Government finances going into the GFC.
My point was, the Tories might have had our finances in much better shape going into it.
But, yes, a huge number of unknowns as to how the Tories would have governed during those years.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
It's a little more complex than that: one person's saving is another one's debt. When is becomes clear that not all the debts will be repaid, then - one way or another - the value of savings need to be diminished. That can either be done via inflation, socialization, or the collapse of the banking system. (Guaranteeing all the deposits is just one of the forms of socialization.)
Value is a tricky word. The crisis itself was deflationary, so it's possible that people could have taken a nominal haircut on their savings without the value of those savings being affected.
One person's savings is another's debt.
When you save you are deferring consumption, by sending the fruits of your labor to someone else who is promising to deliver you the fruits of his labor in the future. All a bank is is a very thin sliver of equity between those two people.
And if that guy is unable to deliver the fruits of his labor in the future, then it is said saver who is on the hook.
Sure, but a financial crisis doesn't change the demographics, it doesn't destroy machinery and it doesn't render anyone infirm.
When assets get mispriced, you need to allow the deck to be reshuffled and for people who made bad bets to pay the price (and I include making deposits in a risky bank as a bad bet).
All of this academic commentary assumes that depositors are playing “capitalism”. In their eyes, they are not. They are just putting their hard-earned savings in what they think is a safe place for later use.
Up to a point. If someone makes a decision to put their money in an Icelandic savings account offering a higher rate of interest, they should be conscious that they are taking on additional risk.
Iceland handled the crisis very well indeed.
They didn't try to "save" their banks and allowed them to fail, implementing the deposit protection schemes.
Those who were protected, got their protections, up to pre-existing limits.
Those who were not, faced a haircut, as they should.
Creditors faced a haircut, as they should.
The taxpayer did not get an open-ended obligation.
As I recall, Iceland had the advantage that it was UK depositors who funded their banks not Icelandic ones. The Icelandic banks effectively let their UK subsidiaries fail, pushing the cost onto the UK taxpayer.
The UK taxpayer had no legal obligation to protect Icelandic deposits.
You're missing the point again. Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
We absolutely could have done the same.
Iceland honoured their legal obligations and let anyone who wasn't legally protected face the consequences.
We chose not to.
That was a political choice, not an economic necessity.
Iceland did have to worry about downstream consequences, but they worried about the ones they were legally obliged to do so, rather than protecting them all. We chose not to, but we had no reason why we couldn't have done the same as them.
Not all UK banks depositors were British citizens either, just like the Icelandic ones.
Having merely had the personal experience of being a consultant in a particular area to one of the Icelandic banks during the GFC and having friends who were senior in parts of another of the Icelandic banks I can tell you that the situation for Iceland and the UK were absolutely not the same.
You seem to have absolutely no comprehension of the weight of UK clients that made up the client base of the Icelandic banks by 2008. They dwarfed the numbers of Icelandic clients in proportion to population as well as sheer numbers.
The UK and other non Iceland parts of the banks were hugely over dependent on mainly UK depositors cash based on the crazy rates of interest they were offering. They were still actively harvesting deposits from mainly UK residents up to October 2008 before they fell apart - at a time when anyone who knew anything about banks knew they were buggered.
The icelandics didn’t have to make the calculations that the UK gov had in that the sheer number of UK people who would have lost their life savings would be politically impossible and caused other knock on effects.
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?
They can be quite pleasant when worked out and landscaped. But I take the general point
I also prefer solar panels and wind turbines to massive power stations with big cooling towers
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
I'm sure you've missed loads. Aren't the English Democrats still going? They received 5,182 votes at GE2024.
Then there's the British Democratic Party. They received more votes than Gina Miller's party.
There are more too, but I don't have the time or inclination to list them all.
There's also Heritage, David Kurten's (vanity) project after he left UKIP. There's Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party in Wales, another UKIP spin-off, and the Scottish Family Party in Scotland. There's Democrats and Veterans, again a UKIP spin-off; they actually managed to win 2 council seats. There's the Homeland Party, more full on fascists.
If we are includimg anti 'woke' theres Posie Parkers Party of Women
There are more UKIP spin offs than remaining Kipper members
Wow, Party of Women have a councillor (through defection)!
Veritas merged into the English Democrats.
There's also the Christian Party, who were in an electoral pact with Veritas, ED and the Jury Team (since dissolved). It's party leader campaigned to removed the dragon from the Welsh flag as a sign of Satan... so, slightly less crazy that the modern Republican Party in the US?
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
I'm sure you've missed loads. Aren't the English Democrats still going? They received 5,182 votes at GE2024.
Then there's the British Democratic Party. They received more votes than Gina Miller's party.
There are more too, but I don't have the time or inclination to list them all.
There's also Heritage, David Kurten's (vanity) project after he left UKIP. There's Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party in Wales, another UKIP spin-off, and the Scottish Family Party in Scotland. There's Democrats and Veterans, again a UKIP spin-off; they actually managed to win 2 council seats. There's the Homeland Party, more full on fascists.
There is also the British Unionist Party, who win council seats in the more Orange parts of North Lanarkshire.
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?
All authoritarians of right and left have a fetish about Really Big Industry. Something about half naked men pouring STEEEEEEEEL. Dirty faces, BIG CHIMNEYYYYYYYYSSSSSSS!
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?
They can be quite pleasant when worked out and landscaped. But I take the general point
I also prefer solar panels and wind turbines to massive power stations with big cooling towers
There's also the small matter of lung disease. Coal has killed millions by that route.
I think lots of surveys have shown that, on average in Britain, people have one fewer child than they want. It's not right-wing to help people achieve their aspirations. It's fundamental to democratic politics.
How you go about doing that could be more or less right or left wing, of course.
Less immigration, bigger houses, lower housing costs, lower childcare costs (start the school year effectively from age 1). Oh and fully transferrable household tax allowances so families who have a stay at home parent are able to benefit from that and a single income earner can support a family of four if they make lifestyle sacrifices.
Adam Curtis, in discussion with Russell Brand about "Hypernormalisation". For those who cannot stand Russell Brand, here is a video with Brand edited out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI&t=1550s
This is why Starmer should not be Prime Minister. Without an inner core he cannot cope with the chaos of the world. He does not have the qualities necessary for the job.
Regrettably Adam Curtis has slightly gone down in my estimation after he put falsehoods into his latest documentary, which were pointed out recently by the BBC's More Or Less radio programme (and Prof John Curtice). Curtis admitted to the mistakes when they were pointed out. The main one was saying Thatcher was behind during the 1979 election campaign until she made an immigration speech, both not true.
Good to know, thank you. Do you have a link to the BBC's More Or Less episode plz?
One of the outside voices on Covid (a bit more rational than most of the iSAGE crowd) a prof at Bristol, Oliver Johnson, pointed out his claims about Thatcher and the 1979 election campaign were wrong, and Curtice picked this up. To Adam Curtis's credit he has acknowleged this, bit it kind of defeats his message (about Thatcherism and dog whistle politics.)
Adam Curtis, in discussion with Russell Brand about "Hypernormalisation". For those who cannot stand Russell Brand, here is a video with Brand edited out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI&t=1550s
This is why Starmer should not be Prime Minister. Without an inner core he cannot cope with the chaos of the world. He does not have the qualities necessary for the job.
Regrettably Adam Curtis has slightly gone down in my estimation after he put falsehoods into his latest documentary, which were pointed out recently by the BBC's More Or Less radio programme (and Prof John Curtice). Curtis admitted to the mistakes when they were pointed out. The main one was saying Thatcher was behind during the 1979 election campaign until she made an immigration speech, both not true.
Good to know, thank you. Do you have a link to the BBC's More Or Less episode plz?
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours. Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
Retard UK, you say?
I'm also mindful of Selena Meyer forgetting the three Rs of her migration policy and making up Repel as one of them.
Someone needs to do the Repel Party. Your happy place where we're in favour of traditional British culture and values and that means drowning the darkies in the channel or shooting them if they float.
'The Repulse Party' would be better.
The five R Class battleships of WW1 and WW2 included two with "Re.." names:
Resolution Revenge
plus two members that were redesigned as battlecruisers:
A stupid version of Cnut. Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Are collieries and spoil heaps and massive open-cast scars more beautiful?
They can be quite pleasant when worked out and landscaped. But I take the general point
I also prefer solar panels and wind turbines to massive power stations with big cooling towers
You would need less of both if UK homes were insulated properly. You could cull the D & E and less homes as they are uneconomic from an energy point of view. Or withdraw energy subsidies which would have the same effect. But we're hooked on generator subsidies - yet another way of adding to the national debt.
Mate of mine as a 14 year old in the late 90s was driving HGVs on the road for a scrap man...
I used to drive a rusty tractor round the cricket pitch and a road roller aged 16.
If a farm kid wasn't driving a tractor by the time he was 8 in my day there would be serious questions asked. I wasn't much good at backing though at that age.
Comments
UKIP - "the new right". Stop The Boats and all that. Rishi isn't a member despite them stealing his best slogan
RefUK Farage Ltd - Nigel promises to recruit at least one other person to the cabinet, otherwise he will do a Churchill and take as many roles as he sees fit
Social Democratic Party - not very social(ist) and as nobody votes for them not democratic either. "The best is Rod Liddle" apparently
Reclaim - Lozza's right to freedom of speech. Just his, not yours.
Advance UK - the Fucked by Farage self-help group
Retard UK - ok I made this up but someone will found it and insist its retard as in slow down our deline and not the other meaning
ConTory UK - Kemi's rebrand is going well if you hate the Tories
I can see him hitting 10,000 but 30,000 is a stretch, unless there are a lot of Reformers looking for something new.
And how do you keep a new party with no representatives in the public eye?
If the aim is to enjoy howling at the moon, signal ideological purity, and scrape a bit of cash and publicity on the way, it makes perfect sense.
What's the line about a organisation's aim being what it does, not what it says?
The results were fairly predictable.
Cowdenbeath & Kirkcaldy:
Lab 27%, SNP 26%, Ref 22%, LD 9%, Con 7%, Grn 7%, Oth 2%
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52437-first-yougov-mrp-since-2024-election-shows-a-hung-parliament-with-reform-uk-as-largest-party
After the Great Financial Crash, the deficit peaked at 7.29% in 2010. Four years later it stood at 4.29%, a reduction of 3pp.
I cannot rate the performance of Cameron/Coalition as being extremely successful. They fecked it up and the deficit came down much more slowly than it ought to have done.
Someone needs to do the Repel Party. Your happy place where we're in favour of traditional British culture and values and that means drowning the darkies in the channel or shooting them if they float.
"Bridget Phillipson says she wants more young people in UK to have children"
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/30/falling-birthrate-bridget-phillipson-education-secretary-labour
How you go about doing that could be more or less right or left wing, of course.
Track and trace - as understood from the pandemic - is rendered almost entirely obsolete by technology since developed.
The availability of cheap instant sequencing in the field, along with lateral flow tests that can be performed at home, and wastewater surveillance, mean a whole different set of plans are needed for the future.
Add in the knowledge and capacity for rapid vaccine development, and we're in a very different world.
In effect, we were blundering around in the dark compared to where we are now, and many of the lessons to be drawn are largely if historic interest.
Robert's comment nothing to do with 'legal obligation', rather that Iceland didn't have to worry about that part of the downstream consequences of letting their banks go under.
That was the UK's problem, whether ur not we decided to protect the deposits.
You were arguing that Iceland was proof we could have done the same. Quite clearly the consequences for us would have been very different.
Still, it should provide a similar object lesson, albeit this time unintended.
Trump: "We're doing coal. I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they're ugly as hell."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1939334557582438496
Then we could have the Repellents vs the Repulsives.
Then there's the British Democratic Party. They received more votes than Gina Miller's party.
There are more too, but I don't have the time or inclination to list them all.
Alongside the 150,000 into poverty chances of government defeat rising again.
A ministerial level resignation this evening might be enough to tip the scales? Labour probably have to deploy the three line whip and have the balls to suspend 40 or so MPs
Controversially a refundable property tax payable by retired people would force many to downsize as well, freeing up larger family homes. Refundable up to five years backdated from the national retirement age.
See the Lucy Letby appeal/questioning the conviction. A coalition of people (see some posters here) grabbed the issue for their side in the culture war.
The sane answer was that some interesting questions had been raised and that an appeal was not impossible. Yet you had people, who were apparently progressive, channeling Lord Denning.
I've very little interest of it all being rehashed at great public expense, and it's likely to be a repetition of the same arguments and dubious justifications all over again.
Iceland honoured their legal obligations and let anyone who wasn't legally protected face the consequences.
We chose not to.
That was a political choice, not an economic necessity.
Iceland did have to worry about downstream consequences, but they worried about the ones they were legally obliged to do so, rather than protecting them all. We chose not to, but we had no reason why we couldn't have done the same as them.
Not all UK banks depositors were British citizens either, just like the Icelandic ones.
There are more UKIP spin offs than remaining Kipper members
Fund child benefit too to make it easier to be a full time mother or only work part time after you have had children
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
However it would be those extra unemployed who would have suffered far more than the likes of him
1) GFC, which, Britain certainly played it's part in.
2) Government finances going into the GFC.
My point was, the Tories might have had our finances in much better shape going into it.
But, yes, a huge number of unknowns as to how the Tories would have governed during those years.
You seem to have absolutely no comprehension of the weight of UK clients that made up the client base of the Icelandic banks by 2008. They dwarfed the numbers of Icelandic clients in proportion to population as well as sheer numbers.
The UK and other non Iceland parts of the banks were hugely over dependent on mainly UK depositors cash based on the crazy rates of interest they were offering. They were still actively harvesting deposits from mainly UK residents up to October 2008 before they fell apart - at a time when anyone who knew anything about banks knew they were buggered.
The icelandics didn’t have to make the calculations that the UK gov had in that the sheer number of UK people who would have lost their life savings would be politically impossible and caused other knock on effects.
NEW THREAD
But granted, Trump has zero taste, too.
I also prefer solar panels and wind turbines to massive power stations with big cooling towers
Veritas merged into the English Democrats.
There's also the Christian Party, who were in an electoral pact with Veritas, ED and the Jury Team (since dissolved). It's party leader campaigned to removed the dragon from the Welsh flag as a sign of Satan... so, slightly less crazy that the modern Republican Party in the US?
Coal has killed millions by that route.
Resolution
Revenge
plus two members that were redesigned as battlecruisers:
Repulse
Renown
And one that was cancelled:
Resistance