Sky News getting excited about the idea of a wealth tax.
"What is a wealth tax, how would it work in the UK and where else has one? The idea of a wealth tax has been raised before in the UK but has never been implemented."
IMO it's a fairly naive, silly article from Sky (as you say, "excited") - afaics they only focus on the "2% above £10m worth" option. Our moronic media will go up the gum tree as they always do, yammering on about extreme options - exactly as the "Labour will tax you until your pips squeak" bollocks we had from the papers and the opposition politicians in the run up to the election.
At least Sky mention the Swiss option which is at much lower levels and is applied more widely and less regressively, and which afaik is about the only one that works in raising a decent amount of money.
Labour would be better saying "nothing like this in the current term - Kemi and Nigel are a couple of BS merchants", and close all the other loopholes of which lists have been published.
Then pivot Council Tax to a % of property value, or at least with no upper bands and make it linear, which is a type of wealth tax on our most featherbedded type of wealth. That would then begin to slay the house price inflation demon and make property more affordable, a superb contrast to the morally-bankrupt Conservative never-ending feeding of the demand side with subsidies, which makes the house price inflation worse.
Pivoting council tax to property value is going to drive renters out of better area's. Who renting is going to pay a council tax based on property value in london
It's a local tax not national, you don't pay 10x the council tax for a studio flat in London as you would for a 2up2down terrace in Grimsby.
I think you have said this before as I think I replied then. It doesn't make sense keeping in local because then it it not a wealth tax and the ability the pay the top band is going to be a lot different to a place will top band is 300k upwards and a place when the top band starts at 2 mill
Those are 2 different things, council tax to pay for local council services and wealth tax based on asset value. Renters wouldn't pay a wealth tax based on the value of the property they are renting because they don't own it, do they. Whether renters should pay for local council services rather than the property owner is an argument that was lost in the late 80s/early 90s.
Don't be naive, if my landlord has to pay 10k property tax it will added to rent just like mortgage rate rises
It's naive to think landlords aren't charging the maximum they can get already. The price is determined by what people will pay, not by costs.
Former Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry has defected to Reform warning they “our last chance to pull Britain back from terminal decline”
Hammer blow to Badenoch as former CCHQ says party doomed
I don't think they are doomed, but no one seems passionate about them, and unless Reform face a sudden drop the calls for a merger or pact which gives Farage the biggest influence (despite many fewer MPs) will become insistent.
Britain is nicer than Bulgaria. You really notice it when you come back from Bulgaria to Britain. It’s nicer here
I might offer that to Visit Britain as a slogan for their next campaign
“Nicer than Bulgaria”
Bulgaria has lost about 25% of its population in the past 20 years.
That was very careless of them.
Of course, an increasing number of countries are seeing populations decline, even without the effects of emigration.
China's population has declined for three years in a row now. South Korean, Japan and Russia are seeing similar.
There are lurid rumours that China's true population is actually considerably smaller - 1.1bn? 900m? 700m? Lower? I don't know how much credibility to give these, but we know the Chinese a) lie, b) are given incentives to lie, and c) aren't great at keeping stats. It would be odd if their claimed population figures are correct.
The same is said of Nigeria.
I think quite a few African populations are derived via the guessing stick.
I remember playing one of the Galactic Civilization games where it would measure population increase and say things like 'Your population went up 152 billion in the last year. Of course, not that many people can have been born, but the important thing is 152 billion more people are paying tax than before' which always made me laugh.
Former Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry has defected to Reform warning they “our last chance to pull Britain back from terminal decline”
Hammer blow to Badenoch as former CCHQ says party doomed
I don't think they are doomed, but no one seems passionate about them, and unless Reform face a sudden drop the calls for a merger or pact which gives Farage the biggest influence (despite many fewer MPs) will become insistent.
Cometh the hour
Cometh Mel Stride
The man with the incredible ability to disappear from my memory 5 minutes after I see him mentioned.
If Twitter had been around in 1720 would somebody have said the same of John Gay?
An absurd comparison. SpaceX puts more spaceships in space and satellites in orbit than any nation or agency on earth - and by a distance
It is not some "south sea bubble"
Why do people lose their minds when it comes to Musk? It is tedious
SpaceX is very dependent on the US government. Not just for contracts; but permissions and permits for a whole host of things, not just launches. Musk's falling out with Trump - and his brain-dead threat to stop providing crewed launches - means there are other ways for a vengeful Trump to hit out at Musk.
That probably will not happen, but it is a risk for the company.
It's certainly possible that some, or all, of SpaceX is no longer controlled by Musk in a few years.
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
A little money would go a long way, legal aid would probably help, but if it is a choice between Health and Justice for example, it's only going in one direction, even if the problems just build up.
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
I seem to recall that at the time it was effectively the richest kingdom in Europe due to a very efficient tax system and therefore irresistible to Duc Guillaume so Anglo Saxon England was really a victim of its own success.
Would have been more interesting if England had remained part of the Danish Kingdom after Cnut and whether it would have made a Scandinavian kingdom develop as the most powerful region of Europe with its potential for control of sea routes and trade across the whole of the North of Europe from the Baltic to the Atlantic.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
It's an interesting counterfactual. On the one hand the centuries of conflict with France (that followed from the Duke of Normandy becoming King of England) bled the country dry, and diverted attention from establishing control of Britain and Ireland and exploring beyond.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Former Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry has defected to Reform warning they “our last chance to pull Britain back from terminal decline”
Hammer blow to Badenoch as former CCHQ says party doomed
I don't think they are doomed, but no one seems passionate about them, and unless Reform face a sudden drop the calls for a merger or pact which gives Farage the biggest influence (despite many fewer MPs) will become insistent.
Britain is nicer than Bulgaria. You really notice it when you come back from Bulgaria to Britain. It’s nicer here
I might offer that to Visit Britain as a slogan for their next campaign
“Nicer than Bulgaria”
Bulgaria has lost about 25% of its population in the past 20 years.
That was very careless of them.
Of course, an increasing number of countries are seeing populations decline, even without the effects of emigration.
China's population has declined for three years in a row now. South Korean, Japan and Russia are seeing similar.
There are lurid rumours that China's true population is actually considerably smaller - 1.1bn? 900m? 700m? Lower? I don't know how much credibility to give these, but we know the Chinese a) lie, b) are given incentives to lie, and c) aren't great at keeping stats. It would be odd if their claimed population figures are correct.
The same is said of Nigeria.
I think quite a few African populations are derived via the guessing stick. Nigerias is still huge, albeit likely to peak much lower than was forecast.
Yes but that could as easily mean under rather than over counting?
Quite possibly.
I don't think anyone in the DRC really has a clue.
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Former Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry has defected to Reform warning they “our last chance to pull Britain back from terminal decline”
Hammer blow to Badenoch as former CCHQ says party doomed
At this rate Kemi, JohnO, and myself will be the last three Tories left.
Jake Berry is a very good catch for them.
They seem to be deploying them whenever the Tories make some headway I feel.
Wasn't Jake Berry that Northern Powerhouse minister with the second home a very long way from his constituency. Along with Sandpit Tice and Yankee Doodle Farage he'll fit right in in Reform. And best of all they'll never meet each other in order to fall out.
I await news that Lee Anderson's second home is actually a Pondokkie on the Limpopo.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
As described on The Rest Is History, England was fabulously wealthy pre 1066. This is one of the reasons it was so attractive to try to get the crown.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
As described on The Rest Is History, England was fabulously wealthy pre 1066. This is one of the reasons it was so attractive to try to get the crown.
Not just wealthy, but the administration to extract wealth from it was pretty decent for the time?
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Yes me too. I was aware of all the usual ones in India like Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but all these new ones seem to have sprung up like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata which seem to be every bit as large and important.
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
I find it hard to believe that there aren't a whole series of marginal gains that could be made to increase the throughput of cases through the system.
One thing that seems to happen quite often which must slow things down and reduces the number of cases that could otherwise be heard, is that defendants are encouraged to plead not guilty in the hope that key witnesses will not turn up to court and the case against them will collapse, only to them change their plea to guilty when they hear that the witnesses are present on the day.
Stop that game somehow and you'd have less court time being wasted, and more cases closed with an early guilty plea.
But one problem would be that if you caught up on the backlog you wouldn't have the prison space to accommodate those convicted.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
Sky News getting excited about the idea of a wealth tax.
"What is a wealth tax, how would it work in the UK and where else has one? The idea of a wealth tax has been raised before in the UK but has never been implemented."
IMO it's a fairly naive, silly article from Sky (as you say, "excited") - afaics they only focus on the "2% above £10m worth" option. Our moronic media will go up the gum tree as they always do, yammering on about extreme options - exactly as the "Labour will tax you until your pips squeak" bollocks we had from the papers and the opposition politicians in the run up to the election.
At least Sky mention the Swiss option which is at much lower levels and is applied more widely and less regressively, and which afaik is about the only one that works in raising a decent amount of money.
Labour would be better saying "nothing like this in the current term - Kemi and Nigel are a couple of BS merchants", and close all the other loopholes of which lists have been published.
Then pivot Council Tax to a % of property value, or at least with no upper bands and make it linear, which is a type of wealth tax on our most featherbedded type of wealth. That would then begin to slay the house price inflation demon and make property more affordable, a superb contrast to the morally-bankrupt Conservative never-ending feeding of the demand side with subsidies, which makes the house price inflation worse.
Pivoting council tax to property value is going to drive renters out of better area's. Who renting is going to pay a council tax based on property value in london
It's a local tax not national, you don't pay 10x the council tax for a studio flat in London as you would for a 2up2down terrace in Grimsby.
I think you have said this before as I think I replied then. It doesn't make sense keeping in local because then it it not a wealth tax and the ability the pay the top band is going to be a lot different to a place will top band is 300k upwards and a place when the top band starts at 2 mill
Those are 2 different things, council tax to pay for local council services and wealth tax based on asset value. Renters wouldn't pay a wealth tax based on the value of the property they are renting because they don't own it, do they. Whether renters should pay for local council services rather than the property owner is an argument that was lost in the late 80s/early 90s.
Don't be naive, if my landlord has to pay 10k property tax it will added to rent just like mortgage rate rises
It's naive to think landlords aren't charging the maximum they can get already. The price is determined by what people will pay, not by costs.
it is only naive if don't rent....the first landlord to arbitratally raise rent loses a tenant dependent on supply on demand. If an external shock hits landlords they all seem to raise it at the same time. Saw it all the time in slough and pretty much every time to make for a new place you were fighting several others for it
"Britain "cannot afford the array of promises it has made to the public", the budget watchdog has concluded in a stark warning that the country has been living beyond its means".
That's true of all developed world countries.
The combination of rising life expectancy, promised pensions, increasingly expensive healthcare, and low birthrates is absolutely toxic for the sustainability of developed world government finances.
Not looking likely for the penny to drop any time soon when we look at today's polling on the Triple Lock.
Well I am over 65 and in the 1% group who would certainly abolish the triple lock. I wonder what % of PB posters and readers are over 65 and also believe the triple lock should certainly go. I guess it is well over 1% of them. Are we too altruistic, or just too well off? Or both.
Neither. Just very untypical of real people.
I post from Alpha Centauri, so, asking for a friend, what is the difference between 'people' and 'real people'. And which sort is Leon?
Fun fact: from Alpha Centauri, our sun would appear as a first magnitude star in Cassiopeia, extending the distinctive "W" pattern into a "W plus a bit more".
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
I find it hard to believe that there aren't a whole series of marginal gains that could be made to increase the throughput of cases through the system.
One thing that seems to happen quite often which must slow things down and reduces the number of cases that could otherwise be heard, is that defendants are encouraged to plead not guilty in the hope that key witnesses will not turn up to court and the case against them will collapse, only to them change their plea to guilty when they hear that the witnesses are present on the day.
Stop that game somehow and you'd have less court time being wasted, and more cases closed with an early guilty plea.
But one problem would be that if you caught up on the backlog you wouldn't have the prison space to accommodate those convicted.
They need to put loads of people who aren’t a danger to the public or themselves on ankle tags which are then managed and monitored by AI - when the tag is fitted, for the duration of the sentence, the places they are allowed to go - work, church or equivalent and the shortest route are entered and monitored by AI and if they deviate a loud alarm whines form the tag so everyone knows they are a crim.
Stops them going anywhere they shouldn’t, could even programme it so that they aren’t allowed in proximity to other criminals in related situations.
They get three strikes otherwise into prison for rest of sentence.
Keeps shoplifters out of shops, violent drunks out of pubs, bank robbers out of gunsmiths.
All managed by a supercomputer so only need staff to go and round up recidivists who can be found easily by the location of their tag. And can’t remove it as it monitors proximity to the limb it’s attached to and removing it would set off the alarm to the police.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
Isn't it bode?
Different words. Bode means portend/foresee. Bide means remain/await.
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
A little money would go a long way, legal aid would probably help, but if it is a choice between Health and Justice for example, it's only going in one direction, even if the problems just build up.
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
Having done Jury service twice in recent years I'd be quite happy if it was abandoned for a lot of trials. Without jury management Crown courts could focus on being better organized and if they failed at least jurors would be spared.
The 24hr riot courts were Magistrates courts, so no jurors.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
I seem to recall that at the time it was effectively the richest kingdom in Europe due to a very efficient tax system and therefore irresistible to Duc Guillaume so Anglo Saxon England was really a victim of its own success.
Would have been more interesting if England had remained part of the Danish Kingdom after Cnut and whether it would have made a Scandinavian kingdom develop as the most powerful region of Europe with its potential for control of sea routes and trade across the whole of the North of Europe from the Baltic to the Atlantic.
Yes, English silver was the main currency - we were still using it to pay the Danegeld. There was a thriving wool trade with Flanders whose ruler's sister was married to William of Normandy.
William had the Papal blessing and was able to bring over a force of knights with promises of riches in England which weren't available in France.
As England had avoided wars during Edward the Confessor's reign, a generation of peace had built up a strong and thriving agricultural economy with abundant food supplies - all in all, it must have looked very attractive to the Norman invaders.
Edward the Confessor was Harthacnut's half brother - they had the same mother, Emma of Normandy. Magnus the Good, who was both King of Denmark and of Norway briefly could have tried to take England by force and threatened to do so but never did. Even if he had, it's likely that after his death in 1047, the throne would have reverted - assuming Edward lived, to him, if not, perhaps Godwin's eldest son, Sweyn, would have ruled until his death in 1052 leaving Harold Godwinson to become Harold II somewhat earlier and with a much stronger claim so no Norman invasion in 1066.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
It's an interesting counterfactual. On the one hand the centuries of conflict with France (that followed from the Duke of Normandy becoming King of England) bled the country dry, and diverted attention from establishing control of Britain and Ireland and exploring beyond.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Was Harold's claim to the throne in 1066 any better than William's?
Story on Times RAdio that Sir ed Davey has sacked Christine JArdine (Chief Whip?) from her front bencch position for voting the wrong way on Tory amendments to the Welfare Bill.
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Yes me too. I was aware of all the usual ones in India like Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but all these new ones seem to have sprung up like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata which seem to be every bit as large and important.
Chinese market circa 2003/4
I *think* it might be Yangshuo but not 100% on that.
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Yes me too. I was aware of all the usual ones in India like Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but all these new ones seem to have sprung up like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata which seem to be every bit as large and important.
The one I came across the other day is Bhubaneswar, the state capital of Odisha. I hadn't heard of either the state or the capital but apparently they are very historic places. There are plenty more like that.
Sky News getting excited about the idea of a wealth tax.
"What is a wealth tax, how would it work in the UK and where else has one? The idea of a wealth tax has been raised before in the UK but has never been implemented."
IMO it's a fairly naive, silly article from Sky (as you say, "excited") - afaics they only focus on the "2% above £10m worth" option. Our moronic media will go up the gum tree as they always do, yammering on about extreme options - exactly as the "Labour will tax you until your pips squeak" bollocks we had from the papers and the opposition politicians in the run up to the election.
At least Sky mention the Swiss option which is at much lower levels and is applied more widely and less regressively, and which afaik is about the only one that works in raising a decent amount of money.
Labour would be better saying "nothing like this in the current term - Kemi and Nigel are a couple of BS merchants", and close all the other loopholes of which lists have been published.
Then pivot Council Tax to a % of property value, or at least with no upper bands and make it linear, which is a type of wealth tax on our most featherbedded type of wealth. That would then begin to slay the house price inflation demon and make property more affordable, a superb contrast to the morally-bankrupt Conservative never-ending feeding of the demand side with subsidies, which makes the house price inflation worse.
Pivoting council tax to property value is going to drive renters out of better area's. Who renting is going to pay a council tax based on property value in london
It's a local tax not national, you don't pay 10x the council tax for a studio flat in London as you would for a 2up2down terrace in Grimsby.
I think you have said this before as I think I replied then. It doesn't make sense keeping in local because then it it not a wealth tax and the ability the pay the top band is going to be a lot different to a place will top band is 300k upwards and a place when the top band starts at 2 mill
Those are 2 different things, council tax to pay for local council services and wealth tax based on asset value. Renters wouldn't pay a wealth tax based on the value of the property they are renting because they don't own it, do they. Whether renters should pay for local council services rather than the property owner is an argument that was lost in the late 80s/early 90s.
Don't be naive, if my landlord has to pay 10k property tax it will added to rent just like mortgage rate rises
It's naive to think landlords aren't charging the maximum they can get already. The price is determined by what people will pay, not by costs.
it is only naive if don't rent....the first landlord to arbitratally raise rent loses a tenant dependent on supply on demand. If an external shock hits landlords they all seem to raise it at the same time. Saw it all the time in slough and pretty much every time to make for a new place you were fighting several others for it
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
A little money would go a long way, legal aid would probably help, but if it is a choice between Health and Justice for example, it's only going in one direction, even if the problems just build up.
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
Having done Jury service twice in recent years I'd be quite happy if it was abandoned for a lot of trials. Without jury management Crown courts could focus on being better organized and if they failed at least jurors would be spared.
The 24hr riot courts were Magistrates courts, so no jurors.
The stuff facing us creating the challenge of Britain being 'broken', though probably exaggerated is real. In the end you have to go for possible solutions rather than solutions that are don't work. I wonder whether in fact the criminal cases backlog should be dealt with by a massive amnesty for tens of thousands of less serious (though many still serious) cases as a one off emergency measure. Just in time to blame the Tories and covid.
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Yes me too. I was aware of all the usual ones in India like Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but all these new ones seem to have sprung up like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata which seem to be every bit as large and important.
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Yes me too. I was aware of all the usual ones in India like Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but all these new ones seem to have sprung up like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata which seem to be every bit as large and important.
The one I came across the other day is Bhubaneswar, the state capital of Odisha. I hadn't heard of either the state or the capital but apparently they are very historic places. There are plenty more like that.
It appears Odisha was previously called Orissa which rings a bell but Bhubaneswar was only founded in 1948 so no great reason for it to stand out in knowledge.
Story on Times RAdio that Sir ed Davey has sacked Christine JArdine (Chief Whip?) from her front bencch position for voting the wrong way on Tory amendments to the Welfare Bill.
A Chief Whip voting the wrong way would be a bit of a misunderstanding of their role.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
It's an interesting counterfactual. On the one hand the centuries of conflict with France (that followed from the Duke of Normandy becoming King of England) bled the country dry, and diverted attention from establishing control of Britain and Ireland and exploring beyond.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Was Harold's claim to the throne in 1066 any better than William's?
The key aspect to William's claim (which was tenuous) was it was supported by Edward the Confessor who was not going to provide a child from his marriage to Godwin's daughter. Edward blamed Godwin for the death of Alfred Atheling, Edward's brother though the actual brutality was carried out by Harold Harefoot, Alfred was handed over to Harold by Godwin.
Naming William as his successor in 1051 at a time when Godwin's fortunes were in decline seemed a smart move to forestsall any attempt by Godwin to put himself or one of his sons on the throne.
Edgar Atheling had the best claim in 1066 but he was only 13 years old - he was the grandson of Edmund Ironside whose death had led to Cnut becoming sole King of England in 1016, the kingdom having been partitioned after the decisive Danish victory at Assandun.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
Isn't it bode?
Different words. Bode means portend/foresee. Bide means remain/await.
Sky News getting excited about the idea of a wealth tax.
"What is a wealth tax, how would it work in the UK and where else has one? The idea of a wealth tax has been raised before in the UK but has never been implemented."
IMO it's a fairly naive, silly article from Sky (as you say, "excited") - afaics they only focus on the "2% above £10m worth" option. Our moronic media will go up the gum tree as they always do, yammering on about extreme options - exactly as the "Labour will tax you until your pips squeak" bollocks we had from the papers and the opposition politicians in the run up to the election.
At least Sky mention the Swiss option which is at much lower levels and is applied more widely and less regressively, and which afaik is about the only one that works in raising a decent amount of money.
Labour would be better saying "nothing like this in the current term - Kemi and Nigel are a couple of BS merchants", and close all the other loopholes of which lists have been published.
Then pivot Council Tax to a % of property value, or at least with no upper bands and make it linear, which is a type of wealth tax on our most featherbedded type of wealth. That would then begin to slay the house price inflation demon and make property more affordable, a superb contrast to the morally-bankrupt Conservative never-ending feeding of the demand side with subsidies, which makes the house price inflation worse.
Pivoting council tax to property value is going to drive renters out of better area's. Who renting is going to pay a council tax based on property value in london
It's a local tax not national, you don't pay 10x the council tax for a studio flat in London as you would for a 2up2down terrace in Grimsby.
I think you have said this before as I think I replied then. It doesn't make sense keeping in local because then it it not a wealth tax and the ability the pay the top band is going to be a lot different to a place will top band is 300k upwards and a place when the top band starts at 2 mill
Those are 2 different things, council tax to pay for local council services and wealth tax based on asset value. Renters wouldn't pay a wealth tax based on the value of the property they are renting because they don't own it, do they. Whether renters should pay for local council services rather than the property owner is an argument that was lost in the late 80s/early 90s.
Don't be naive, if my landlord has to pay 10k property tax it will added to rent just like mortgage rate rises
It's naive to think landlords aren't charging the maximum they can get already. The price is determined by what people will pay, not by costs.
it is only naive if don't rent....the first landlord to arbitratally raise rent loses a tenant dependent on supply on demand. If an external shock hits landlords they all seem to raise it at the same time. Saw it all the time in slough and pretty much every time to make for a new place you were fighting several others for it
Yes, if there's a common external shock, that can impact the whole market. But if your landlord could get an extra £10k now, he would, and if his costs go up by £10k while the market is static, he has to eat that.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
It's an interesting counterfactual. On the one hand the centuries of conflict with France (that followed from the Duke of Normandy becoming King of England) bled the country dry, and diverted attention from establishing control of Britain and Ireland and exploring beyond.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Was Harold's claim to the throne in 1066 any better than William's?
I thought that at the time the English system was for the Witan to decide, and so whether one person had a stronger claim by right of descent makes no difference.
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
A little money would go a long way, legal aid would probably help, but if it is a choice between Health and Justice for example, it's only going in one direction, even if the problems just build up.
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
Having done Jury service twice in recent years I'd be quite happy if it was abandoned for a lot of trials. Without jury management Crown courts could focus on being better organized and if they failed at least jurors would be spared.
The 24hr riot courts were Magistrates courts, so no jurors.
The stuff facing us creating the challenge of Britain being 'broken', though probably exaggerated is real. In the end you have to go for possible solutions rather than solutions that are don't work. I wonder whether in fact the criminal cases backlog should be dealt with by a massive amnesty for tens of thousands of less serious (though many still serious) cases as a one off emergency measure. Just in time to blame the Tories and covid.
I think that would be a mistake. You'd have tens of thousands of victims who would be looking forward to vindication and justice in court, denied. Tens of thousands of offenders encouraged by the impunity. You would demoralise everyone in the criminal justice system who would see the work they had done on those cases thrown away.
Though it does seem to be contiguous with others, so not sure it really counts.
I’ve been to Foshan. Not far from Hong Kong. Not remarkable.
Xi’an for me. Never heard of it.
You've probably heard of the Terracotta Warriors though, which come from there. Which isn't just a random fact. Xi'an was the first capital of a unified China. Xi'an was also the capital during the Tang dynasty and as such was the eastern end of the Silk Road.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
Yes me too. I was aware of all the usual ones in India like Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but all these new ones seem to have sprung up like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata which seem to be every bit as large and important.
The one I came across the other day is Bhubaneswar, the state capital of Odisha. I hadn't heard of either the state or the capital but apparently they are very historic places. There are plenty more like that.
It appears Odisha was previously called Orissa which rings a bell but Bhubaneswar was only founded in 1948 so no great reason for it to stand out in knowledge.
Bhubaneswar's claim to fame I understand is several dozen Hindu temples dating mainly to the 7th to 14th C
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
A little money would go a long way, legal aid would probably help, but if it is a choice between Health and Justice for example, it's only going in one direction, even if the problems just build up.
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
Having done Jury service twice in recent years I'd be quite happy if it was abandoned for a lot of trials. Without jury management Crown courts could focus on being better organized and if they failed at least jurors would be spared.
The 24hr riot courts were Magistrates courts, so no jurors.
The stuff facing us creating the challenge of Britain being 'broken', though probably exaggerated is real. In the end you have to go for possible solutions rather than solutions that are don't work. I wonder whether in fact the criminal cases backlog should be dealt with by a massive amnesty for tens of thousands of less serious (though many still serious) cases as a one off emergency measure. Just in time to blame the Tories and covid.
I think that would be a mistake. You'd have tens of thousands of victims who would be looking forward to vindication and justice in court, denied. Tens of thousands of offenders encouraged by the impunity. You would demoralise everyone in the criminal justice system who would see the work they had done on those cases thrown away.
The consequences would be catastrophic.
I agree with all of that. The current situation and my suggestion are both catastrophic. But suppose there is no way out of the present crisis because of court time and trial length and so on - the delays go on for ever and, so it is said, are still getting worse.
It’s past 11 pm, and a warm sunny evening out there, with people still sitting out and enjoying an evening drink, with the sun an hour and a half before it dips below the horizon.
Tomorrow I head north, and as far as I can see from my schedule and the sunset tables, after tonight, my next sunset will be on 21st July. So eleven days of continuous daylight, if not sunshine.
What is quite surprising is, after an extended period of no sunset at all, how quickly a reasonable period of night returns to places north of the Arctic Circle. Within a week of having no sunset, the spot I will be in, in Finland, will be having three hours of no sun. From zero to three hours in just seven days!
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Does she also qualify for Motability scheme as well for a cheap car?
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
It's an interesting counterfactual. On the one hand the centuries of conflict with France (that followed from the Duke of Normandy becoming King of England) bled the country dry, and diverted attention from establishing control of Britain and Ireland and exploring beyond.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Was Harold's claim to the throne in 1066 any better than William's?
Not much. But there wasn't such a clear concept of who should be next in that period. It wasn't quite the Polish elected monarchy, but it wasn't far off. If you could stake a claim and get yourself crowned, that was enough. Harold was king because he had claimed the crown first. In any case, that's not the point. The point is that the English would have almost certainly been better off under his kingship than that of William. Obviously we can't say we personally - as in me, Cookie, in the 21st century - would have been better off: changing that pretty large thing that far back would mean the people populating Great Britain today would be entirely different. We all have both Norman and Anglo-Saxon ancestors, though in most cases almost certainly rather more of the latter. And history would have been entirely different in unpredictable ways. But the number of presents in which the English are better off strike me as likely to vastly outweigh the number of presents in which they are worse off.
I don't believe I have ever personally loathed a human-being-I've-never-met as much as I loathe Sir Kier Traitor
It's visceral. It makes me sweat blood. My eyes pop out even more than normal. I want him REDACTED
What is this? Why does he invoke these reactions? Judging by my peers in the knapping trade, I am not alone
You voted for him so I guess there must be a great deal of sublimated self loathing going on.
They do say heroin addicts are often highly intelligent egotists with low self esteem....
However I quit the Beige decades ago, so, no, this is plain old disgust. Starmer disgusts me. He is a traitor with an extra dash of peevish moral vanity, and that hideous squeaky voice. He is all too easy to loathe. I do believe this is becoming a problem for him
For contrast, I never loathed Sturgeon nor Salmond, who both actively wanted to break up the UK. I sometime feared them, sometimes scoffed at them, sometimes felt a little pity for their lost cause. But I never felt this gut-level contempt and abhorrence
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Don't you also qualify for Motability scheme as well for a cheap car?
If you get higher rate mobility PIP but it wouldnt be as well, it would be instead of
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Benefits are not hypothecated
I was responding to rottenborough:
"But their basic calculation involves PIP. PIP is paid to cover the additional costs of being disabled. A worker would not have these costs."
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Does she also qualify for Motability scheme as well for a cheap car?
You use some of the money for that - it's not extra. But the government loses VAT on the car sale, so it does cost the government extra really.
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Does she also qualify for Motability scheme as well for a cheap car?
You use some of the money for that - it's not extra. But the government loses VAT on the car sale, so it does cost the government extra really.
I understand its not on top, that you agree to pay some of your PIP towards it. I was asking more is that an individual who could qualify for the scheme?
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Benefits are not hypothecated
I was responding to rottenborough:
"But their basic calculation involves PIP. PIP is paid to cover the additional costs of being disabled. A worker would not have these costs."
Should have quoted, sorry.
I know but you said shes not using her PIP as it is meant to be used. Thats not how it works
Stupid things in the news number 704: considering having trials without a jury to speed things up. But only for the complex and obvious ones.
I have a better idea. Remember when we fast tracked justice for the rioters? Let’s do that. How do we clear the backlog? Find the courts to stay open longer hours and more days.
“But how do we pay for that”. As if the crime epidemic caused by our inability to schedule simple trials until (reportedly) 2029 is zero cost.
Pay more up front to clear the trial backlog to make criminal justice a weapon against crime to save money lost in having parts of the country crime-ridden hell holes.
I feel sorry for Kier Sunak. Head of the continuity LabCon government making no progress at all getting any of the problems fixed. Let the swamp consume itself, get people round the table and ask how do we get things moving.
Too much crime. Costing money. Can’t nick and prosecute due to backlog caused by lack of money. FFS do I have to draw you a picture in crayon?
One interesting point Leveson made in his interview on Today was that in the past lawyers would often do two cases in a day and sometimes start a third however today it very rarely happens.
This, he said, was down to the vastly increased levels of evidence, PACE, new technology for harvesting evidence, new technology that was introduced as evidence, effectively loads of new things that have come into play and effectively increased the chances of getting justice done have also contributed to slowing down the pursuit of justice. His point being that this isn’t purely a problem relating to money for the system.
In Georgian times criminal trials, including capital ones, were often over in less than an hour.
Then that must be our new target. I don’t think anyone could argue that it wouldn’t be more efficient and good for victims and perpetrators alongside those called for jury service. Verdicts delivered in one hour or your money back.
I think it was @DavidL that commented post covid that the only realistic way of catching up with the backlog was to abandon most of the backlog cases.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
A little money would go a long way, legal aid would probably help, but if it is a choice between Health and Justice for example, it's only going in one direction, even if the problems just build up.
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
Having done Jury service twice in recent years I'd be quite happy if it was abandoned for a lot of trials. Without jury management Crown courts could focus on being better organized and if they failed at least jurors would be spared.
The 24hr riot courts were Magistrates courts, so no jurors.
The stuff facing us creating the challenge of Britain being 'broken', though probably exaggerated is real. In the end you have to go for possible solutions rather than solutions that are don't work. I wonder whether in fact the criminal cases backlog should be dealt with by a massive amnesty for tens of thousands of less serious (though many still serious) cases as a one off emergency measure. Just in time to blame the Tories and covid.
I think that would be a mistake. You'd have tens of thousands of victims who would be looking forward to vindication and justice in court, denied. Tens of thousands of offenders encouraged by the impunity. You would demoralise everyone in the criminal justice system who would see the work they had done on those cases thrown away.
The consequences would be catastrophic.
I agree with all of that. The current situation and my suggestion are both catastrophic. But suppose there is no way out of the present crisis because of court time and trial length and so on - the delays go on for ever and, so it is said, are still getting worse.
is there a workable third option?
If the delays are still getting worse then the only thing an amnesty will achieve is the demand for a further amnesty x years down the line when budget cuts and the boost to crime that follows the first amnesty recreates the crisis.
The only way out is to do the hard work of finding the money required to increase capacity and doing the hard work of ensuring that money is used as efficiently as possible. If there was an easy way out it would have been done already.
At some point you have to start doing what needs to be done, instead of wishing there was a magic way out.
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Does she also qualify for Motability scheme as well for a cheap car?
You use some of the money for that - it's not extra. But the government loses VAT on the car sale, so it does cost the government extra really.
I understand its not on top, that you agree to pay some of your PIP towards it. I was asking more is that an individual who could qualify for the scheme?
If she receives higher rate mobility pip she would qualify
I don't believe I have ever personally loathed a human-being-I've-never-met as much as I loathe Sir Kier Traitor
It's visceral. It makes me sweat blood. My eyes pop out even more than normal. I want him REDACTED
What is this? Why does he invoke these reactions? Judging by my peers in the knapping trade, I am not alone
You voted for him so I guess there must be a great deal of sublimated self loathing going on.
They do say heroin addicts are often highly intelligent egotists with low self esteem....
However I quit the Beige decades ago, so, no, this is plain old disgust. Starmer disgusts me. He is a traitor with an extra dash of peevish moral vanity, and that hideous squeaky voice. He is all too easy to loathe. I do believe this is becoming a problem for him
For contrast, I never loathed Sturgeon nor Salmond, who both actively wanted to break up the UK. I sometime feared them, sometimes scoffed at them, sometimes felt a little pity for their lost cause. But I never felt this gut-level contempt and abhorrence
Why, you ask, does he invoke (evoke?) these reactions. I don't react as strongly as you, but agree he is a grave disappointment.
Two particulars which have an effect for me: He goes out of his way to emphasise that he doesn't have an inner life. This, I suppose, can't be true so either he is being evasive, or deliberately annoying. Or both. And then you wonder what his inner life is like as there seems to be so much denial. Which is troubling.
Secondly, my expectations were minimal. They were: solid and boring competence, a plan, a narrative and all well communicated, reasonable levels of honesty and straightforwardness. Score: Zero.
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
"Gregg Wallace’s autism means he can’t wear underwear, say friends
Sources close to ex-MasterChef presenter claim he has ‘hypersensitivity’ to tight clothing and his condition is partly to blame for his inappropriate behaviour" (£)
Bollocks. Loose fitting cotton boxers are older than him. Disgusting that his "friends" and the Times would try that on.
Actually, an aversion to kinds and types of clothing IS a feature of autism. It's not ludicrous
This does not mean Wallace is innocent, but the claim is not intrinsically ridiculous. He is obviously autistic. Recall his "day in the life" article
So bloody what! Autism is not an excuse for predatory behaviour and sexual harassment. Nor are people with autism more likely to behave in such a way. It is disgusting the way he is trying to turn himself into a victim. He's no victim. Just a gropey entitled predator who won't take responsibility for his actions and was enabled by lots of others who turned a blind eye to his revolting behaviour. Good riddance.
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine. She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
Does she also qualify for Motability scheme as well for a cheap car?
You use some of the money for that - it's not extra. But the government loses VAT on the car sale, so it does cost the government extra really.
If this government is clever (stop laughing at the back), then they will use the two year Timms review to fundamentally rethink PIP from top to bottom.
I don't believe I have ever personally loathed a human-being-I've-never-met as much as I loathe Sir Kier Traitor
It's visceral. It makes me sweat blood. My eyes pop out even more than normal. I want him REDACTED
What is this? Why does he invoke these reactions? Judging by my peers in the knapping trade, I am not alone
Buyer's remorse.
No, it's far beyond that. And, as I say, I have noted a similar unusual reaction in my professional peers, many of whom certainly did NOT vote for him
Starmer provokes intense dislike
I am Northern/urban/middle class/public sector. I move in circles in which Labour has, historically, never been criticised. (Until Corbyn came along - and even then it was an urgent 'is it ok not to like him?'). I've been quite surprised by the scorn and pity with which Starmer is treated (and indeed Reeves). Is it the feeling of being let down? Is it that these people just assumed when Labour came in everything would be ok, and it isn't, and they blame him for it? People certainly allow themselves to feel intensely irritated by him in a way which they just didn't by Tony Blair.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
Isn't it bode?
Different words. Bode means portend/foresee. Bide means remain/await.
Bode and Bided are both past tense forms of Bide.
I can't see any evidence for 'bode' being the past tense of 'bide' in any trusted sources.
Former Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry has defected to Reform warning they “our last chance to pull Britain back from terminal decline”
Hammer blow to Badenoch as former CCHQ says party doomed
At this rate Kemi, JohnO, and myself will be the last three Tories left.
And me, not really a huge story though, gloryhunting ex MP sees Reform as his best chance to win his seat back (not sure Reform members will take too kindly to the fact Berry backed Remain in 2016 though)
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
You make a lot of him saying he doesn't dream. But is the actual situation that he just doesn't remember his dreams?
I don't believe I have ever personally loathed a human-being-I've-never-met as much as I loathe Sir Kier Traitor
It's visceral. It makes me sweat blood. My eyes pop out even more than normal. I want him REDACTED
What is this? Why does he invoke these reactions? Judging by my peers in the knapping trade, I am not alone
Buyer's remorse.
No, it's far beyond that. And, as I say, I have noted a similar unusual reaction in my professional peers, many of whom certainly did NOT vote for him
Starmer provokes intense dislike
I am Northern/urban/middle class/public sector. I move in circles in which Labour has, historically, never been criticised. (Until Corbyn came along - and even then it was an urgent 'is it ok not to like him?'). I've been quite surprised by the scorn and pity with which Starmer is treated (and indeed Reeves). Is it the feeling of being let down? Is it that these people just assumed when Labour came in everything would be ok, and it isn't, and they blame him for it? People certainly allow themselves to feel intensely irritated by him in a way which they just didn't by Tony Blair.
Yes exactly. All my lefty friends heap scorn upon him, and some of them - notably including a couple that KNOW him - are absolutely brutal in their disdain. He rubs people up in a really bad way
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
He's still got really good hair, however. That's in his favour. Rayner would be better at politics. However, this would be outweighed by her being even worse at governing. I think it would be electorally neutral for Labour.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
But England was pretty well off before 1066. It could well have become top dog anyway.
It's an interesting counterfactual. On the one hand the centuries of conflict with France (that followed from the Duke of Normandy becoming King of England) bled the country dry, and diverted attention from establishing control of Britain and Ireland and exploring beyond.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Was Harold's claim to the throne in 1066 any better than William's?
I thought that at the time the English system was for the Witan to decide, and so whether one person had a stronger claim by right of descent makes no difference.
Actually there was Edgar Aethling, the grandson of Edmund Ironside who was therefore the heir of the Royal House of Cerdic. However Harold Godwineson staged a kind of coup, which was in turn orherthrown by William. The Witan still voted for Edgar as king after the death of Harold on Senlac hill, but right of conquest had already trumped the wishes of the Witan and Edgar returned to exile... ultimately the last of the Saxon royal house gained refuge with their relative, Yaroslav the Wise of Kyiv.
What a chump Redwood is. No awareness at all that the period of Norman subjugation, as he would put it, was the furnace from which English would emerge as the language that would go on to conquer the world. Prior to the Conquest, 'we' spoke Old English, with all the complexity of other European languages - three genders, a complex set of inflections and endings, a whole stack of now unfamiliar letters.
While the Normans were running everything and churning out their documents in Latin and Norman french, our ancestors were turning Old English into Middle English - one of the most dramatic linguistic transformations of history. Spoken by ordinary folk and rarely written down, out went the genders and most of the inflections and endings, with propositions and a more rigid word order used to convey tense and subject/object. The dialect in the linguistic driving seat shifted from Wessex to the more populous and prosperous East Midlands, enabling a synthesis of English and Norse syntax. Through some process not fully understood, the most straightforward elements of English and Norse were melded a new language, which also took in a batch of Latin derived words from French. After a few hundred years, when writing stuff down in the way that ordinary folk spoke, our proto-super-language was born.
Had we not invented printing at just the time when, for reasons not fully understood, we changed the pronunciation of all of our vowels, such that the pronunciation of English became separated from its spelling, English would have been so obviously superior that no-one would ever have bothered to invent Esperanto.
I think the Norman Conquest was beneficial in the long run, for this country, but pretty awful for the people (those North of the Humber at any rate), that had to live through it. In that respect, it resembles the downfall of the Western Roman empire.
1066 and all that was definitive. The Norman conquest was a good thing because it helped England become top dog.
England bided its time in that case. It wasn't top dog until maybe seven centuries later and state wasn't called England by that point anyway.
Isn't it bode?
Different words. Bode means portend/foresee. Bide means remain/await.
Bode and Bided are both past tense forms of Bide.
I can't see any evidence for 'bode' being the past tense of 'bide' in any trusted sources.
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
What about Ed Miliband? You were your typically warm and effusive self towards him in the period 2010-15 when he was leader of the opposition. Suppose he became PM now. Better or worse?
Interesting surfing X. Reform clearly delighted to get experience etc on board but a lot of casual support looking for something new really not impressed at Reform taking in any old ex Tory looking for a gig. Reform should be wary of becoming Nigel Farage and a load of people the voters booted out a year ago Still, they arent going to say no thanks i suppose
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
Musk is autistic and certainly anything but dreamless (if still weird).
We have had a few PMs who if not full autistic or aspie are at least on the spectrum in the last 50 years or so, Heath, Brown, May and now Starmer, maybe Truss too
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
He's still got really good hair, however. That's in his favour. Rayner would be better at politics. However, this would be outweighed by her being even worse at governing. I think it would be electorally neutral for Labour.
How can you be worse at governing than Starmer? Seriously, how? He's lost control of the Commons and he has a trillion seat majority
Rayner would, I think, not have done that
I am not personally hoping for a Rayner led government. I am pretty sure she would be as bad for Britain as Starmer or worse, but I reckon she'd be cannier and more popular
Is the rat looking to desert the sinking Tory ship? Or does a rat see a congenial home in the Farage party? This is the key question concerning Jake Berry, whom Rishi Sunak amongst others rightly couldn't stand.
Bit of both probably, but more the first I think. So yes, not good news for the Tories even if they are better off without him.
I don't believe I have ever personally loathed a human-being-I've-never-met as much as I loathe Sir Kier Traitor
It's visceral. It makes me sweat blood. My eyes pop out even more than normal. I want him REDACTED
What is this? Why does he invoke these reactions? Judging by my peers in the knapping trade, I am not alone
Buyer's remorse.
No, it's far beyond that. And, as I say, I have noted a similar unusual reaction in my professional peers, many of whom certainly did NOT vote for him
Starmer provokes intense dislike
I am Northern/urban/middle class/public sector. I move in circles in which Labour has, historically, never been criticised. (Until Corbyn came along - and even then it was an urgent 'is it ok not to like him?'). I've been quite surprised by the scorn and pity with which Starmer is treated (and indeed Reeves). Is it the feeling of being let down? Is it that these people just assumed when Labour came in everything would be ok, and it isn't, and they blame him for it? People certainly allow themselves to feel intensely irritated by him in a way which they just didn't by Tony Blair.
The problem is that it's Rishi repeated but with added delays. And I will leave it there because I've pointed out multiple times what they needed to do which was sort out tax with an apology last October...
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
What about Ed Miliband? You were your typically warm and effusive self towards him in the period 2010-15 when he was leader of the opposition. Suppose he became PM now. Better or worse?
Better
And I cordially despise Ed Miliband. Nonetheless I reckon he'd do better (tho not by much). I get the sense the Milibands have a basic patriotism, however weirdly expressed. I really do not get that sense from Sir Keir Traitor, which is why he is always seen with 17 union jacks, he knows we know that he knows that we know that he hates Britain
Is the rat looking to desert the sinking Tory ship? Or does a rat see a congenial home in the Farage party? This is the key question concerning Jake Berry, whom Rishi Sunak amongst others rightly couldn't stand.
Bit of both probably, but more the first I think. So yes, not good news for the Tories even if they are better off without him.
I suggest CCHQ release tomorrow all the statements Berry made in the 2016 referendum opposing Brexit and sit back and watch the reaction from the Reform rank and file
Comments
Cometh Mel Stride
They seem to be deploying them whenever the Tories make some headway I feel.
That probably will not happen, but it is a risk for the company.
It's certainly possible that some, or all, of SpaceX is no longer controlled by Musk in a few years.
Not very palatable, and politically impossible, but short of a massive injection of funds into the criminal justice system, what is the alternative?
I expect some kind of fudged stopgap solution, as I cannot see the recommendations being politically feasible, and other ones will be even less so as you note.
Would have been more interesting if England had remained part of the Danish Kingdom after Cnut and whether it would have made a Scandinavian kingdom develop as the most powerful region of Europe with its potential for control of sea routes and trade across the whole of the North of Europe from the Baltic to the Atlantic.
On the other hand, the pressure of that conflict on the body politic helped to provoke a number of critical developments in the history of English law and Parliament.
Nobody gonna slow me down, oh no
I got to keep on moving
Ain't nothin' gonna break Mel Stride
I'm running and I won't touch ground Oh no
I got to keep on moving
I don't think anyone in the DRC really has a clue.
It is now a provincial capital and regional centre for North East China.
I have the equivalent problem of large cities I haven't heard of in India.
I await news that Lee Anderson's second home is actually a Pondokkie on the Limpopo.
Lots of disaffected Tories who lost at the GE will want to join Reform as it's the best way to get a seat.
One thing that seems to happen quite often which must slow things down and reduces the number of cases that could otherwise be heard, is that defendants are encouraged to plead not guilty in the hope that key witnesses will not turn up to court and the case against them will collapse, only to them change their plea to guilty when they hear that the witnesses are present on the day.
Stop that game somehow and you'd have less court time being wasted, and more cases closed with an early guilty plea.
But one problem would be that if you caught up on the backlog you wouldn't have the prison space to accommodate those convicted.
Stops them going anywhere they shouldn’t, could even programme it so that they aren’t allowed in proximity to other criminals in related situations.
They get three strikes otherwise into prison for rest of sentence.
Keeps shoplifters out of shops, violent drunks out of pubs, bank robbers out of gunsmiths.
All managed by a supercomputer so only need staff to go and round up recidivists who can be found easily by the location of their tag. And can’t remove it as it monitors proximity to the limb it’s attached to and removing it would set off the alarm to the police.
In addition, NASA and the US Airforce audit the books of SpaceX - it's a requirement for government contracts.
Their revenue per launch is much, much higher than that - both for the price and the ancillary services.
The launch price is, essentially, set by the lowest prices of their competitors (more or less).
The Starlink system (Virgin Airlines just signed up) is still expanding and the revenue from that is pretty interesting.
Without jury management Crown courts could focus on being better organized and if they failed at least jurors would be spared.
The 24hr riot courts were Magistrates courts, so no jurors.
William had the Papal blessing and was able to bring over a force of knights with promises of riches in England which weren't available in France.
As England had avoided wars during Edward the Confessor's reign, a generation of peace had built up a strong and thriving agricultural economy with abundant food supplies - all in all, it must have looked very attractive to the Norman invaders.
Edward the Confessor was Harthacnut's half brother - they had the same mother, Emma of Normandy. Magnus the Good, who was both King of Denmark and of Norway briefly could have tried to take England by force and threatened to do so but never did. Even if he had, it's likely that after his death in 1047, the throne would have reverted - assuming Edward lived, to him, if not, perhaps Godwin's eldest son, Sweyn, would have ruled until his death in 1052 leaving Harold Godwinson to become Harold II somewhat earlier and with a much stronger claim so no Norman invasion in 1066.
I *think* it might be Yangshuo but not 100% on that.
Do miss the backpacking life a bit.. !
Naming William as his successor in 1051 at a time when Godwin's fortunes were in decline seemed a smart move to forestsall any attempt by Godwin to put himself or one of his sons on the throne.
Edgar Atheling had the best claim in 1066 but he was only 13 years old - he was the grandson of Edmund Ironside whose death had led to Cnut becoming sole King of England in 1016, the kingdom having been partitioned after the decisive Danish victory at Assandun.
But their basic calculation involves PIP. PIP is paid to cover the additional costs of being disabled. A worker would not have these costs.
The consequences would be catastrophic.
https://x.com/SophyRidgeSky/status/1943026129255960798
He's persuasive and articulate. This is a huge blow for the Tories. I think they're finished
https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1943045627358687574
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hindu_temples_in_Bhubaneswar
(Do you think people who get £500 PIP a month but only spend £200 give the money back?)
It's visceral. It makes me sweat blood. My eyes pop out even more than normal. I want him REDACTED
What is this? Why does he invoke these reactions? Judging by my peers in the knapping trade, I am not alone
"Emily, 41, from Croydon, is autistic and struggles with time management and organising basic tasks for her daily routine.
She works full-time as a flight attendant after developing strategies to help organise her day, and also receives a Personal Independence Payment (Pip) of more than £400 a month. But the money mostly goes on her regular bills, rather than on the occupational therapy she thinks would really help her to establish a proper routine.
...
Receiving Pip means Emily is eligible for a disabled discount railcard, which makes travel to work more affordable, and if she were to lose that she says she would struggle with the cost of getting to work."
To be clear, Emily seems like a good person doing her best. But she isn't using PIP for what it's intended for.
is there a workable third option?
Tomorrow I head north, and as far as I can see from my schedule and the sunset tables, after tonight, my next sunset will be on 21st July. So eleven days of continuous daylight, if not sunshine.
What is quite surprising is, after an extended period of no sunset at all, how quickly a reasonable period of night returns to places north of the Arctic Circle. Within a week of having no sunset, the spot I will be in, in Finland, will be having three hours of no sun. From zero to three hours in just seven days!
In any case, that's not the point. The point is that the English would have almost certainly been better off under his kingship than that of William.
Obviously we can't say we personally - as in me, Cookie, in the 21st century - would have been better off: changing that pretty large thing that far back would mean the people populating Great Britain today would be entirely different. We all have both Norman and Anglo-Saxon ancestors, though in most cases almost certainly rather more of the latter. And history would have been entirely different in unpredictable ways. But the number of presents in which the English are better off strike me as likely to vastly outweigh the number of presents in which they are worse off.
However I quit the Beige decades ago, so, no, this is plain old disgust. Starmer disgusts me. He is a traitor with an extra dash of peevish moral vanity, and that hideous squeaky voice. He is all too easy to loathe. I do believe this is becoming a problem for him
For contrast, I never loathed Sturgeon nor Salmond, who both actively wanted to break up the UK. I sometime feared them, sometimes scoffed at them, sometimes felt a little pity for their lost cause. But I never felt this gut-level contempt and abhorrence
"But their basic calculation involves PIP. PIP is paid to cover the additional costs of being disabled. A worker would not have these costs."
Should have quoted, sorry.
Starmer provokes intense dislike
The only way out is to do the hard work of finding the money required to increase capacity and doing the hard work of ensuring that money is used as efficiently as possible. If there was an easy way out it would have been done already.
At some point you have to start doing what needs to be done, instead of wishing there was a magic way out.
And my bubble is particularly interesting.... if you are interested in the intersection of politics/news/flint knapping
They got Gordon...
Brittas.
Two particulars which have an effect for me: He goes out of his way to emphasise that he doesn't have an inner life. This, I suppose, can't be true so either he is being evasive, or deliberately annoying. Or both. And then you wonder what his inner life is like as there seems to be so much denial. Which is troubling.
Secondly, my expectations were minimal. They were: solid and boring competence, a plan, a narrative and all well communicated, reasonable levels of honesty and straightforwardness. Score: Zero.
The bad news: no-one offers better so far.
Would ANY putative Labour leader/PM be getting the kind of terrible ratings Starmer is getting? Is it just because he has a crap hand to play, and Labour are a party without clues?
That may be the case, but I suggest Starmer is uniquely dislikeable, due to his lack of charm, his moral vanity, his adenoidal voice, his priggish face, his lawyerly demeanour, his pessimisstic whining, his anti-British opinions, his autistic dreamless weirdness. All of this makes him the worst possible leader at the worst possible time
He is, therefore, a drag on Labour polling even if they are already deep in the dirt. Somebody like Rayner would do better. This may have betting implications
Is it the feeling of being let down? Is it that these people just assumed when Labour came in everything would be ok, and it isn't, and they blame him for it? People certainly allow themselves to feel intensely irritated by him in a way which they just didn't by Tony Blair.
I'm sure that is not that uncommon.
Rayner would be better at politics. However, this would be outweighed by her being even worse at governing. I think it would be electorally neutral for Labour.
Reform should be wary of becoming Nigel Farage and a load of people the voters booted out a year ago
Still, they arent going to say no thanks i suppose
We have had a few PMs who if not full autistic or aspie are at least on the spectrum in the last 50 years or so, Heath, Brown, May and now Starmer, maybe Truss too
Rayner would, I think, not have done that
I am not personally hoping for a Rayner led government. I am pretty sure she would be as bad for Britain as Starmer or worse, but I reckon she'd be cannier and more popular
Bit of both probably, but more the first I think. So yes, not good news for the Tories even if they are better off without him.
And I cordially despise Ed Miliband. Nonetheless I reckon he'd do better (tho not by much). I get the sense the Milibands have a basic patriotism, however weirdly expressed. I really do not get that sense from Sir Keir Traitor, which is why he is always seen with 17 union jacks, he knows we know that he knows that we know that he hates Britain