I see the forum has spent half the morning debating the economics of Regency England.
Never change PB, never change!!!
A marked improvement on ‘deport all foreigners’ as the debate may, or may not, have been last night. Different people had a different perspective. My perspective was I didn’t want a piece of it.
It moved on to "anyone who doesn't have four British grandparents should have fewer rights".
Are we doing 'white babies'? If so, shall I post up a pic of my new grandson?
Two of the grandparents are Russian, one was born in Germany (though British), and the other is Irish. Which rights do I loose?
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
It is a UN Convention that is tied up with EU law on the environment. When it was first introduced the test was set out in R (Corner House Research) v Secretary of State for Trade and Industry [2005] EWCA Civ 192. In essence, court had to be satisfied that: (i) the issues raised are of general public importance, (ii) the public interest requires those issues to be resolved, (iii) the applicant has no private interest in the outcome of the case, (iv) having regard to the financial resources of the parties, it is just and fair to make an order, and (v) if the order is not made, the applicant will “probably” discontinue proceedings, and act reasonably in doing so.
Ultimately, this was a test which was satisfied only in exceptional circumstances.
As usual in this country we proceeded to gold and then platinum leaf it concluding that this did not comply with the Convention and discouraged challenges to public bodies. It has since become the norm in these types of cases. We need to get back to where we were in 2005, that there is no guaranteed relief, that it is for the courts to decide in appropriate cases and the onus is on the claimant to show that there was a genuine public interest, as opposed to a NIMBY interest. Right now, it not only wastes major sums of public money, it intimidates planning authorities who know that they risk being very significantly out of pocket by spurious litigation.
Loathe though I am to agree with Jenrick about anything, he is right about this.
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
The Labour govt have said, IIRC, that they'll arrest Netanyahu if he comes to the UK and send him to the ICC.
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
The Labour govt have said, IIRC, that they'll arrest Netanyahu if he comes to the UK and send him to the ICC.
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
UK does that and Israel stop giving us intelligence. One missed terror attack that Israel could have stopped and that's curtains for any government.
They won't say it, but that's almost certainly the calculation.
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
UK does that and Israel stop giving us intelligence. One missed terror attack that Israel could have stopped and that's curtains for any government.
They won't say it, but that's almost certainly the calculation.
Malthouse and Leigh will have considered this and presumably dismissed it
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Not earbuds but a phone.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
Interesting
I had my Chinatechnophany a few months ago when I mislaid all my Apple earbuds (average price £175?) and resorted to this cheap pair of Chinese earbuds (£20) which I had bought but never really used before
I then realised that the Chinese buds were not just five times cheaper but…. Superior. Better bass
I’ve now stocked up on these absurdly cheap earbuds and virtually abandoned Apple. They can fuck off with charging me nearly £200 for stuff that always gets lost and is unusable after a year
My wife has some Bose earbuds which were absurdly expensive. Also made in the PRC.
I suspect the Chinese Red Army also knew your whereabouts from your more expensive earbuds too.
I don’t care any more. I’ve lost too many mega expensive £180 Apple earbuds. That stings. Or they get grimy and stop working
Lose a £20 set? Who cares. Buy 3 more sets
This is the approach I've adopted with glasses - removing around 50% of the stress in my life - and have always taken with watches.
I only own one item which is both valuable and easy to lose, and that's my wedding ring. I have great anxiety about taking it off - not for sentimental reasons, but because I have low expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is not on my finger.
(Five two-letter words in a row there. That's unusual. I should have said "High expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is on my finger." That would have been seven.)
You could have gone for "keep track of it if it is on or by my finger" whould have been nine two letter words in a row
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
UK does that and Israel stop giving us intelligence. One missed terror attack that Israel could have stopped and that's curtains for any government.
They won't say it, but that's almost certainly the calculation.
Malthouse and Leigh will have considered this and presumably dismissed it
More likely they think, on balance, we should take the risk. Easy to say from the opposition benches.
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
UK does that and Israel stop giving us intelligence. One missed terror attack that Israel could have stopped and that's curtains for any government.
They won't say it, but that's almost certainly the calculation.
Malthouse and Leigh will have considered this and presumably dismissed it
More likely they think, on balance, we should take the risk. Easy to say from the opposition benches.
Great opportunity for Kemi to take the moral high ground.
A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
Its their belief system. They are fully signed up to self ID. They are presumably shitting themselves about what is happening in Fife right now - the whole structural edifice of trans and self ID hitting the real world buffers.
The Courier is reporting that management below board level were simply "stunned" by the evidence of Isla Bumba, the equality and human rights officer at NHS Fife last week. This woman (she wasn't sure one way or another) was being paid over £50k a year for this post. To describe her evidence as incoherent would be like describing the North Sea as damp. This is exactly the sort of thing that must end. Now.
Ref 27 (-1) Labour 23 (+1) Con 17 (=) LD 15 (-1) Green 11 (-1) SNP 3 (=)
No Sultana Party??
Because...raisins.
I’ve just racked off a first batch of sultana wine.
Should be nice to drink in 18 months time.
How does one make sultana wine? Sultanas + water + yeast?
Lots of sugar too
I chop them, wash them, soak them. You wash them as they coat the with sunflower oil, to remove as much as you can.
Add sugar and pectolase and leave them 24 hours.
Take about 10% out with water and blend it and put that in a clean vessel.
Strain the juice off and put that in a clean vessel.
Top up with sterile water. I buy 5l bottles from Tesco.
The left over pulp I strain and add to the sterile water.
Add a campden tablet and citric acid
Leave for a day and then add yeast and away you go.
Dried fruit is very sugar intensive. Works just as well for raisins, dates and apricots. Tried fig this year. It’s rank.
I'm hoping to replicate a classic from about 10 years past - blackberry and elderberry wine. The combo of the two works well - the sweetness can be cloying on its own so the tannins of the other cut through. I gave a bottle to a friend who drinks a fair bit of wine (but is no expert) and was very sceptical of home brew. He loved it!
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
I suspect their argument, as also projected by Malthouse, is if we as a nation wanted Bibi to cease and desist in razing Gaza we should not be supplying weapons.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
UK does that and Israel stop giving us intelligence. One missed terror attack that Israel could have stopped and that's curtains for any government.
They won't say it, but that's almost certainly the calculation.
Surely Bibi & co wouldn’t let an impending terrorist attack of which they were aware go ahead?
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
The Booths in Ripon is being replaced by Tesco so even North Yorkshire isn't the posh supermarket centre it used to be.
Sadly Israel is becoming one of the most hated nations on the planet all because of Netenyahu and his bunch of genocidal maniacs .
Anti-semitism will inevitably rise because of his actions. And that’s tragic because there are many Jews appalled by what’s going on in Gaza and who want rid of Netenyahu.
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
The Booths in Ripon is being replaced by Tesco so even North Yorkshire isn't the posh supermarket centre it used to be.
South Wales only has three Waitrose stores. Monmouth, a town which used to be in England, Cardiff and Cowbridge. There was a former Safeway store in Barry that briefly became a Waitrose. It wasn't even in one of the less unpleasant parts of Barry. It is a Home Bargains and a Food Warehouse now which is better in keeping with the demographic.
Ref 27 (-1) Labour 23 (+1) Con 17 (=) LD 15 (-1) Green 11 (-1) SNP 3 (=)
No Sultana Party??
Because...raisins.
I’ve just racked off a first batch of sultana wine.
Should be nice to drink in 18 months time.
How does one make sultana wine? Sultanas + water + yeast?
Lots of sugar too
I chop them, wash them, soak them. You wash them as they coat the with sunflower oil, to remove as much as you can.
Add sugar and pectolase and leave them 24 hours.
Take about 10% out with water and blend it and put that in a clean vessel.
Strain the juice off and put that in a clean vessel.
Top up with sterile water. I buy 5l bottles from Tesco.
The left over pulp I strain and add to the sterile water.
Add a campden tablet and citric acid
Leave for a day and then add yeast and away you go.
Dried fruit is very sugar intensive. Works just as well for raisins, dates and apricots. Tried fig this year. It’s rank.
I'm hoping to replicate a classic from about 10 years past - blackberry and elderberry wine. The combo of the two works well - the sweetness can be cloying on its own so the tannins of the other cut through. I gave a bottle to a friend who drinks a fair bit of wine (but is no expert) and was very sceptical of home brew. He loved it!
Ooh, that sounds nice.
I made blackcurrant this year from some a Co worker gave me last year and I kept frozen.
We get loads of wild blackberries round here. Now,I’m retired I may well,go foraging.
"Migrants are exploiting a family reunion scheme set up after the Afghanistan “kill list” scandal to trick their way into Britain, insiders have claimed.
Some migrants evacuated under the Government’s emergency resettlement scheme are contacting people in Afghanistan offering “safe arrivals by plane”, according to multiple sources in the Afghan community.
Other Afghans in the UK report being approached with offers of up to £20,000 per person to falsely list strangers in their home country as family members for evacuation.
One Afghan living in the north of England told The Telegraph that he had been contacted by at least three people asking him to register their names and relatives as his wife, brother, or sister to secure passage to Britain."
It gets worse
"Another migrant who arrived in Britain in 2023, said: “Lots of people came here like this and more will be coming.
“The Government has basically opened an official smuggling route – many have already come, and many more are on the way.
“People are being smuggled into Britain with all expenses paid by the Government. A lot of people came this way. A lot.”"
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
The Booths in Ripon is being replaced by Tesco so even North Yorkshire isn't the posh supermarket centre it used to be.
Yes, I saw, that on the news. It’s a spot we used to drop in on when we went to Fountains Abbey.
When I was into craft beer it had a good selection.
"Migrants are exploiting a family reunion scheme set up after the Afghanistan “kill list” scandal to trick their way into Britain, insiders have claimed.
Some migrants evacuated under the Government’s emergency resettlement scheme are contacting people in Afghanistan offering “safe arrivals by plane”, according to multiple sources in the Afghan community.
Other Afghans in the UK report being approached with offers of up to £20,000 per person to falsely list strangers in their home country as family members for evacuation.
One Afghan living in the north of England told The Telegraph that he had been contacted by at least three people asking him to register their names and relatives as his wife, brother, or sister to secure passage to Britain."
It gets worse
"Another migrant who arrived in Britain in 2023, said: “Lots of people came here like this and more will be coming.
“The Government has basically opened an official smuggling route – many have already come, and many more are on the way.
“People are being smuggled into Britain with all expenses paid by the Government. A lot of people came this way. A lot.”"
"Migrants are exploiting a family reunion scheme set up after the Afghanistan “kill list” scandal to trick their way into Britain, insiders have claimed.
Some migrants evacuated under the Government’s emergency resettlement scheme are contacting people in Afghanistan offering “safe arrivals by plane”, according to multiple sources in the Afghan community.
Other Afghans in the UK report being approached with offers of up to £20,000 per person to falsely list strangers in their home country as family members for evacuation.
One Afghan living in the north of England told The Telegraph that he had been contacted by at least three people asking him to register their names and relatives as his wife, brother, or sister to secure passage to Britain."
It gets worse
"Another migrant who arrived in Britain in 2023, said: “Lots of people came here like this and more will be coming.
“The Government has basically opened an official smuggling route – many have already come, and many more are on the way.
“People are being smuggled into Britain with all expenses paid by the Government. A lot of people came this way. A lot.”"
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Sadly Israel is becoming one of the most hated nations on the planet all because of Netenyahu and his bunch of genocidal maniacs .
Anti-semitism will inevitably rise because of his actions. And that’s tragic because there are many Jews appalled by what’s going on in Gaza and who want rid of Netenyahu.
Yes, my wife's family think it's horrific.
Meanwhile, even my brother-in-law, who actually lived in Israel for a while, never wants to visit the country again, and his son, who has a star of david necklace, reports more anti-semitism on his holidays in Europe than he's seen before.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Hang on.
We PBers are the management class. Can't we sack the minions?
A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
Its their belief system. They are fully signed up to self ID. They are presumably shitting themselves about what is happening in Fife right now - the whole structural edifice of trans and self ID hitting the real world buffers.
It's a bit wordy but the headline should be rewritten as follows:
A man in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) killed his husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
It is a UN Convention that is tied up with EU law on the environment. When it was first introduced the test was set out in R (Corner House Research) v Secretary of State for Trade and Industry [2005] EWCA Civ 192. In essence, court had to be satisfied that: (i) the issues raised are of general public importance, (ii) the public interest requires those issues to be resolved, (iii) the applicant has no private interest in the outcome of the case, (iv) having regard to the financial resources of the parties, it is just and fair to make an order, and (v) if the order is not made, the applicant will “probably” discontinue proceedings, and act reasonably in doing so.
Ultimately, this was a test which was satisfied only in exceptional circumstances.
As usual in this country we proceeded to gold and then platinum leaf it concluding that this did not comply with the Convention and discouraged challenges to public bodies. It has since become the norm in these types of cases. We need to get back to where we were in 2005, that there is no guaranteed relief, that it is for the courts to decide in appropriate cases and the onus is on the claimant to show that there was a genuine public interest, as opposed to a NIMBY interest. Right now, it not only wastes major sums of public money, it intimidates planning authorities who know that they risk being very significantly out of pocket by spurious litigation.
Loathe though I am to agree with Jenrick about anything, he is right about this.
He could have done something about it when he was the responsible minister. For those who struggle with maths, 1 Jenrick is at least 2.3 million zone 1-4 faredodgers, accounting for the reduced level of social housing he'd agreed for Westferry, 1 Jenrick exceeds TfL estimated annual fare evasion. (£30-50m in avoided CIL, £100m in reduced level of social housing)
Is this going to be an exciting thread? I might take an early walk - I am sure I will be able to hear it when 2 miles away.
Option 4 - Stay in the Union.
There seem to me to be several important areas that need more consideration. One is the prospects of renewable energy as a replacement for oil. Another is perhaps that AFAICS the SNP have been quite effective at demonstrating their incapability to run a country.
Another interesting one is the increased dependence of the Royal Navy on Scotland these days.
Given the way England has run the UK , the SNP record is for sure not worse
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Not earbuds but a phone.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
Interesting
I had my Chinatechnophany a few months ago when I mislaid all my Apple earbuds (average price £175?) and resorted to this cheap pair of Chinese earbuds (£20) which I had bought but never really used before
I then realised that the Chinese buds were not just five times cheaper but…. Superior. Better bass
I’ve now stocked up on these absurdly cheap earbuds and virtually abandoned Apple. They can fuck off with charging me nearly £200 for stuff that always gets lost and is unusable after a year
My wife has some Bose earbuds which were absurdly expensive. Also made in the PRC.
I suspect the Chinese Red Army also knew your whereabouts from your more expensive earbuds too.
I don’t care any more. I’ve lost too many mega expensive £180 Apple earbuds. That stings. Or they get grimy and stop working
Lose a £20 set? Who cares. Buy 3 more sets
This is the approach I've adopted with glasses - removing around 50% of the stress in my life - and have always taken with watches.
I only own one item which is both valuable and easy to lose, and that's my wedding ring. I have great anxiety about taking it off - not for sentimental reasons, but because I have low expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is not on my finger.
(Five two-letter words in a row there. That's unusual. I should have said "High expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is on my finger." That would have been seven.)
You could have gone for "keep track of it if it is on or by my finger" whould have been nine two letter words in a row
Very good. Was hoping someone else would get into the spirit of this.
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
The Booths in Ripon is being replaced by Tesco so even North Yorkshire isn't the posh supermarket centre it used to be.
South Wales only has three Waitrose stores. Monmouth, a town which used to be in England, Cardiff and Cowbridge. There was a former Safeway store in Barry that briefly became a Waitrose. It wasn't even in one of the less unpleasant parts of Barry. It is a Home Bargains and a Food Warehouse now which is better in keeping with the demographic.
Is this going to be an exciting thread? I might take an early walk - I am sure I will be able to hear it when 2 miles away.
Option 4 - Stay in the Union.
There seem to me to be several important areas that need more consideration. One is the prospects of renewable energy as a replacement for oil. Another is perhaps that AFAICS the SNP have been quite effective at demonstrating their incapability to run a country.
Another interesting one is the increased dependence of the Royal Navy on Scotland these days.
Given the way England has run the UK , the SNP record is for sure not worse
As long as HMG continues to lie about stuff, ably assisted by the media, the gullible will lap it up and the dishonest will propagate it.
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Not earbuds but a phone.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
Interesting
I had my Chinatechnophany a few months ago when I mislaid all my Apple earbuds (average price £175?) and resorted to this cheap pair of Chinese earbuds (£20) which I had bought but never really used before
I then realised that the Chinese buds were not just five times cheaper but…. Superior. Better bass
I’ve now stocked up on these absurdly cheap earbuds and virtually abandoned Apple. They can fuck off with charging me nearly £200 for stuff that always gets lost and is unusable after a year
My wife has some Bose earbuds which were absurdly expensive. Also made in the PRC.
I suspect the Chinese Red Army also knew your whereabouts from your more expensive earbuds too.
I don’t care any more. I’ve lost too many mega expensive £180 Apple earbuds. That stings. Or they get grimy and stop working
Lose a £20 set? Who cares. Buy 3 more sets
This is the approach I've adopted with glasses - removing around 50% of the stress in my life - and have always taken with watches.
I only own one item which is both valuable and easy to lose, and that's my wedding ring. I have great anxiety about taking it off - not for sentimental reasons, but because I have low expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is not on my finger.
(Five two-letter words in a row there. That's unusual. I should have said "High expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is on my finger." That would have been seven.)
You could have gone for "keep track of it if it is on or by my finger" whould have been nine two letter words in a row
Very good. Was hoping someone else would get into the spirit of this.
That loses its integrity though because it doesn't make sense.
Nobody keeps their wedding ring *by* their finger. It's either on the finger or it's in a drawer.
(I wear mine on my right hand btw. And it's quite feminine looking with inset rubies. Little bit of quirkiness there)
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
The Booths in Ripon is being replaced by Tesco so even North Yorkshire isn't the posh supermarket centre it used to be.
South Wales only has three Waitrose stores. Monmouth, a town which used to be in England, Cardiff and Cowbridge. There was a former Safeway store in Barry that briefly became a Waitrose. It wasn't even in one of the less unpleasant parts of Barry. It is a Home Bargains and a Food Warehouse now which is better in keeping with the demographic.
Abergavenny has one too.
It does. Once again a former Safeway. Probably the best of the lot as all the others are smaller than your usual Supermarket, including the Cardiff store.
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Not earbuds but a phone.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
Interesting
I had my Chinatechnophany a few months ago when I mislaid all my Apple earbuds (average price £175?) and resorted to this cheap pair of Chinese earbuds (£20) which I had bought but never really used before
I then realised that the Chinese buds were not just five times cheaper but…. Superior. Better bass
I’ve now stocked up on these absurdly cheap earbuds and virtually abandoned Apple. They can fuck off with charging me nearly £200 for stuff that always gets lost and is unusable after a year
My wife has some Bose earbuds which were absurdly expensive. Also made in the PRC.
I suspect the Chinese Red Army also knew your whereabouts from your more expensive earbuds too.
I don’t care any more. I’ve lost too many mega expensive £180 Apple earbuds. That stings. Or they get grimy and stop working
Lose a £20 set? Who cares. Buy 3 more sets
This is the approach I've adopted with glasses - removing around 50% of the stress in my life - and have always taken with watches.
I only own one item which is both valuable and easy to lose, and that's my wedding ring. I have great anxiety about taking it off - not for sentimental reasons, but because I have low expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is not on my finger.
(Five two-letter words in a row there. That's unusual. I should have said "High expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is on my finger." That would have been seven.)
You could have gone for "keep track of it if it is on or by my finger" whould have been nine two letter words in a row
Very good. Was hoping someone else would get into the spirit of this.
That loses its integrity though because it doesn't make sense.
Nobody keeps their wedding ring *by* their finger. It's either on the finger or it's in a drawer.
(I wear mine on my right hand btw. And it's quite feminine looking with inset rubies. Little bit of quirkiness there)
Ref 27 (-1) Labour 23 (+1) Con 17 (=) LD 15 (-1) Green 11 (-1) SNP 3 (=)
No Sultana Party??
Because...raisins.
I’ve just racked off a first batch of sultana wine.
Should be nice to drink in 18 months time.
How does one make sultana wine? Sultanas + water + yeast?
Lots of sugar too
I chop them, wash them, soak them. You wash them as they coat the with sunflower oil, to remove as much as you can.
Add sugar and pectolase and leave them 24 hours.
Take about 10% out with water and blend it and put that in a clean vessel.
Strain the juice off and put that in a clean vessel.
Top up with sterile water. I buy 5l bottles from Tesco.
The left over pulp I strain and add to the sterile water.
Add a campden tablet and citric acid
Leave for a day and then add yeast and away you go.
Dried fruit is very sugar intensive. Works just as well for raisins, dates and apricots. Tried fig this year. It’s rank.
I'm hoping to replicate a classic from about 10 years past - blackberry and elderberry wine. The combo of the two works well - the sweetness can be cloying on its own so the tannins of the other cut through. I gave a bottle to a friend who drinks a fair bit of wine (but is no expert) and was very sceptical of home brew. He loved it!
Ooh, that sounds nice.
I made blackcurrant this year from some a Co worker gave me last year and I kept frozen.
We get loads of wild blackberries round here. Now,I’m retired I may well,go foraging.
Blackcurrant I found a bit astringent. You think it will be like alcoholic ribenna but its not... Blackberry on its own can be cloying.
I've eight pints of nettle beer waiting to bottle (brewed with lemon and ginger for a bit extra). I'm a bit wary as one batch I made years ago led to digestive concern each time I drank it...
I see the forum has spent half the morning debating the economics of Regency England.
Never change PB, never change!!!
A marked improvement on ‘deport all foreigners’ as the debate may, or may not, have been last night. Different people had a different perspective. My perspective was I didn’t want a piece of it.
It moved on to "anyone who doesn't have four British grandparents should have fewer rights".
Are we doing 'white babies'? If so, shall I post up a pic of my new grandson?
Two of the grandparents are Russian, one was born in Germany (though British), and the other is Irish. Which rights do I loose?
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Not earbuds but a phone.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
Interesting
I had my Chinatechnophany a few months ago when I mislaid all my Apple earbuds (average price £175?) and resorted to this cheap pair of Chinese earbuds (£20) which I had bought but never really used before
I then realised that the Chinese buds were not just five times cheaper but…. Superior. Better bass
I’ve now stocked up on these absurdly cheap earbuds and virtually abandoned Apple. They can fuck off with charging me nearly £200 for stuff that always gets lost and is unusable after a year
My wife has some Bose earbuds which were absurdly expensive. Also made in the PRC.
I suspect the Chinese Red Army also knew your whereabouts from your more expensive earbuds too.
I don’t care any more. I’ve lost too many mega expensive £180 Apple earbuds. That stings. Or they get grimy and stop working
Lose a £20 set? Who cares. Buy 3 more sets
This is the approach I've adopted with glasses - removing around 50% of the stress in my life - and have always taken with watches.
I only own one item which is both valuable and easy to lose, and that's my wedding ring. I have great anxiety about taking it off - not for sentimental reasons, but because I have low expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is not on my finger.
(Five two-letter words in a row there. That's unusual. I should have said "High expectations of being able to keep track of it if it is on my finger." That would have been seven.)
You could have gone for "keep track of it if it is on or by my finger" whould have been nine two letter words in a row
Very good. Was hoping someone else would get into the spirit of this.
That loses its integrity though because it doesn't make sense.
Nobody keeps their wedding ring *by* their finger. It's either on the finger or it's in a drawer.
(I wear mine on my right hand btw. And it's quite feminine looking with inset rubies. Little bit of quirkiness there)
Why? (The right hand, not the rubies)
I honestly couldn't tell you. When I wore a watch it was on my right wrist too. All I can think is there must be some deep primeval need to keep my left hand free of all fripperies. Perhaps it was my ancient ancestors dominant hand. The one they used to hunt and kill with.
Just on the Jewish and Israeli issue, I also know someone who used to write for the Jewish Chronicle, quite conservatuve, religious, and from an Orthodox family, who now regularly rages to me about Israel and its conduct. I"ve not seen this sort of thing before, and it really surprises me.
There is real disquiet in the Jewish community, as usual not reflected by the Board of Deputies.
I see the forum has spent half the morning debating the economics of Regency England.
Never change PB, never change!!!
A marked improvement on ‘deport all foreigners’ as the debate may, or may not, have been last night. Different people had a different perspective. My perspective was I didn’t want a piece of it.
It moved on to "anyone who doesn't have four British grandparents should have fewer rights".
Are we doing 'white babies'? If so, shall I post up a pic of my new grandson?
Two of the grandparents are Russian, one was born in Germany (though British), and the other is Irish. Which rights do I loose?
Do they want to project some of the videos that Hamas took on Oct 7th to get some balance?
We all want this to stop.
This has been going on for the best part of a century.....frankly most of the country probably doesn't care if it stops or not. We just no longer give a damn
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
The Booths in Ripon is being replaced by Tesco so even North Yorkshire isn't the posh supermarket centre it used to be.
South Wales only has three Waitrose stores. Monmouth, a town which used to be in England, Cardiff and Cowbridge. There was a former Safeway store in Barry that briefly became a Waitrose. It wasn't even in one of the less unpleasant parts of Barry. It is a Home Bargains and a Food Warehouse now which is better in keeping with the demographic.
Just on the Jewish and Israeli issue, I also know someone who used to write for the Jewish Chronicle, quite conservatuve, religious, and from an Orthodox family, who now regularly rages to me about Israel and its conduct. I"ve not seen this sort of thing before, and it really surprises me.
There is real disquiet in the Jewish community, as usual not reflected by the Board of Deputies.
Not all Jews are Israel. Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
Hexham, Ponteland, Jesmond… I don’t know the 4th without Googling.
Putting it bluntly the SNP have run out of ideas. In the 2024 General Election their manifesto was FOR SCOTLAND - if you weren't for the SNP you were against Scotland. They actually deployed that line that aggressively on the doorstep!
Our problems north of the wall are practically the same as south of the wall - a broken country where the economy means jobs struggle to pay soaring bills, and services crumbling due to a lack of cash.
The SNP solution to not being able to see a dentist or no investment into roads or a lack of teachers? Independence! From what I saw last year punters have largely stopped listening to this guff - they want solutions that are little more tangible than Independence or being told you're a traitor to the flag.
My gut instinct is that they are going to struggle - a very tired incumbent party riven deeply on most issues presiding over a mess. It should be party time for challenging parties - oh yeah Labour are also a very tired incumbent party.
I think we're going to get a chaos result. SNP losing a stack of seats, Labour not gaining as many as they demand by right, Reform picking up scores, the Tories reduced back into redoubts, LD and Green and likely others doing decently well.
I look forward to giving you updates as a candidate.
They have zero opposition , assorted no users and comic singers who failed Scotland forever. Only a moron would want to vote for an English party to run Scotland.
Ref 27 (-1) Labour 23 (+1) Con 17 (=) LD 15 (-1) Green 11 (-1) SNP 3 (=)
No Sultana Party??
Because...raisins.
I’ve just racked off a first batch of sultana wine.
Should be nice to drink in 18 months time.
How does one make sultana wine? Sultanas + water + yeast?
Lots of sugar too
I chop them, wash them, soak them. You wash them as they coat the with sunflower oil, to remove as much as you can.
Add sugar and pectolase and leave them 24 hours.
Take about 10% out with water and blend it and put that in a clean vessel.
Strain the juice off and put that in a clean vessel.
Top up with sterile water. I buy 5l bottles from Tesco.
The left over pulp I strain and add to the sterile water.
Add a campden tablet and citric acid
Leave for a day and then add yeast and away you go.
Dried fruit is very sugar intensive. Works just as well for raisins, dates and apricots. Tried fig this year. It’s rank.
I'm hoping to replicate a classic from about 10 years past - blackberry and elderberry wine. The combo of the two works well - the sweetness can be cloying on its own so the tannins of the other cut through. I gave a bottle to a friend who drinks a fair bit of wine (but is no expert) and was very sceptical of home brew. He loved it!
Ooh, that sounds nice.
I made blackcurrant this year from some a Co worker gave me last year and I kept frozen.
We get loads of wild blackberries round here. Now,I’m retired I may well,go foraging.
Blackcurrant I found a bit astringent. You think it will be like alcoholic ribenna but its not... Blackberry on its own can be cloying.
I've eight pints of nettle beer waiting to bottle (brewed with lemon and ginger for a bit extra). I'm a bit wary as one batch I made years ago led to digestive concern each time I drank it...
"Migrants are exploiting a family reunion scheme set up after the Afghanistan “kill list” scandal to trick their way into Britain, insiders have claimed.
Some migrants evacuated under the Government’s emergency resettlement scheme are contacting people in Afghanistan offering “safe arrivals by plane”, according to multiple sources in the Afghan community.
Other Afghans in the UK report being approached with offers of up to £20,000 per person to falsely list strangers in their home country as family members for evacuation.
One Afghan living in the north of England told The Telegraph that he had been contacted by at least three people asking him to register their names and relatives as his wife, brother, or sister to secure passage to Britain."
It gets worse
"Another migrant who arrived in Britain in 2023, said: “Lots of people came here like this and more will be coming.
“The Government has basically opened an official smuggling route – many have already come, and many more are on the way.
“People are being smuggled into Britain with all expenses paid by the Government. A lot of people came this way. A lot.”"
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
Hexham, Ponteland, Jesmond… I don’t know the 4th without Googling.
That's three posh areas! In fact that could be the answer to Siri. Name the three ritziest places in the NE.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Hang on.
We PBers are the management class. Can't we sack the minions?
The management class won't like it. We have marketised health and education and persuaded people they need "choice" despite overall performance decreasing and the cost being vast.
Healthcare - most people want to see a local GP and have general hospitals close to them. Specialist stuff? Regional. Take an axe to much of the endless management - bye bye trusts and integrated health boards in fancy offices.
Education - we are paying for multiple overlapping corporate structures. My old Primary and High Schools are now part of a 9 school trust. With a huge team of staff. A nice office. A strategic director of IT and a screen full of corporate logos they have partnered with.
In both cases we have an army of administrators sat in offices managing contracts. With much less buying power than the old bigger authority they replaced. Paying more for less.
We can't afford this wasteful duplication built around competitive "choice".
‘NEW: James Cleverly will become as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing. Tories see this as a key role to take on Angela Rayner’
So the Tories who failed on housebuilding can criticise Labour when they fail on housebuilding and the Lib Dem’s can demand an extension of the green belt.
Meanwhile Reform will promise whatever they think people want to hear and change daily.
You missed out the Cleverly Defence, which I imagine will get deployed:
CLEVERLY: Why aren't Labour building the houses we need? RAYNER: You had 14 years to build houses and you did nothing! If its important to build houses in Barnsley why didn't you do so? CLEVERLY: Cos its a shithole
Vote Conservative because if you want shit government you may as well be sneered at whilst it happens.
No shortage of new housing in Barnsley.
Or affordable housing generally in Barnsley.
Housing affordability problems are based in London and the Waitrose belts.
No shortage in Chester Le Street either. Lots of properties sub £100K and the homes in the region of £200-£300K seem to be flying off the shelves at the moment.
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
Hexham, Ponteland, Jesmond… I don’t know the 4th without Googling.
It’s a concession on a garage on the way to Whitley bay from shiremoor.
Similar to the one on the motorway by Sheffield IIRC
I see the forum has spent half the morning debating the economics of Regency England.
Never change PB, never change!!!
A marked improvement on ‘deport all foreigners’ as the debate may, or may not, have been last night. Different people had a different perspective. My perspective was I didn’t want a piece of it.
It moved on to "anyone who doesn't have four British grandparents should have fewer rights".
Are we doing 'white babies'? If so, shall I post up a pic of my new grandson?
Two of the grandparents are Russian, one was born in Germany (though British), and the other is Irish. Which rights do I loose?
Are you a member of the Royal Family?
you can have a loose fitting shirt but you cannot loose your rights
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Just on the Jewish and Israeli issue, I also know someone who used to write for the Jewish Chronicle, quite conservatuve, religious, and from an Orthodox family, who now regularly rages to me about Israel and its conduct. I"ve not seen this sort of thing before, and it really surprises me.
There is real disquiet in the Jewish community, as usual not reflected by the Board of Deputies.
Not all Jews are Israel. Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
Not all Israelis are the Likud/Shas/National Religious Party–Religious Zionism/New Hope coalition government.
Putting it bluntly the SNP have run out of ideas. In the 2024 General Election their manifesto was FOR SCOTLAND - if you weren't for the SNP you were against Scotland. They actually deployed that line that aggressively on the doorstep!
Our problems north of the wall are practically the same as south of the wall - a broken country where the economy means jobs struggle to pay soaring bills, and services crumbling due to a lack of cash.
The SNP solution to not being able to see a dentist or no investment into roads or a lack of teachers? Independence! From what I saw last year punters have largely stopped listening to this guff - they want solutions that are little more tangible than Independence or being told you're a traitor to the flag.
My gut instinct is that they are going to struggle - a very tired incumbent party riven deeply on most issues presiding over a mess. It should be party time for challenging parties - oh yeah Labour are also a very tired incumbent party.
I think we're going to get a chaos result. SNP losing a stack of seats, Labour not gaining as many as they demand by right, Reform picking up scores, the Tories reduced back into redoubts, LD and Green and likely others doing decently well.
I look forward to giving you updates as a candidate.
They have zero opposition , assorted no users and comic singers who failed Scotland forever. Only a moron would want to vote for an English party to run Scotland.
We're not an English party - we're federal. We're not unionists - we're federalist
I do enjoy the petty anti-English jingoism though. Makes those of you who partake feel all self-righteous and patriotic, whilst ever larger numbers of Scottish voters mutter under their breath and stop voting SNP.
You want a Scottish party capable of running Scotland? Many to choose from. Most have fuck all support.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Seems to be the Bankers. £104bn in debt interest from the spending on GFC, and Covid. Who would have thought paying a whole country to stay at (grossly inflated mortgaged) home would be so expensive.
A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
Its their belief system. They are fully signed up to self ID. They are presumably shitting themselves about what is happening in Fife right now - the whole structural edifice of trans and self ID hitting the real world buffers.
Taxes need to go up on middle earners. Everything else is displacement activity. All the experts know this. Politicians for obvious reasons aren't willing to face up to reality.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Sadly Israel is becoming one of the most hated nations on the planet all because of Netenyahu and his bunch of genocidal maniacs .
Anti-semitism will inevitably rise because of his actions. And that’s tragic because there are many Jews appalled by what’s going on in Gaza and who want rid of Netenyahu.
Interesting piece about Ethno Nationalism as propagated by Rupert Lowe and GB News. Not popular at all in the UK according to the polls. Start watching about 2/3rds of the way in......
Putting it bluntly the SNP have run out of ideas. In the 2024 General Election their manifesto was FOR SCOTLAND - if you weren't for the SNP you were against Scotland. They actually deployed that line that aggressively on the doorstep!
Our problems north of the wall are practically the same as south of the wall - a broken country where the economy means jobs struggle to pay soaring bills, and services crumbling due to a lack of cash.
The SNP solution to not being able to see a dentist or no investment into roads or a lack of teachers? Independence! From what I saw last year punters have largely stopped listening to this guff - they want solutions that are little more tangible than Independence or being told you're a traitor to the flag.
My gut instinct is that they are going to struggle - a very tired incumbent party riven deeply on most issues presiding over a mess. It should be party time for challenging parties - oh yeah Labour are also a very tired incumbent party.
I think we're going to get a chaos result. SNP losing a stack of seats, Labour not gaining as many as they demand by right, Reform picking up scores, the Tories reduced back into redoubts, LD and Green and likely others doing decently well.
I look forward to giving you updates as a candidate.
They have zero opposition , assorted no users and comic singers who failed Scotland forever. Only a moron would want to vote for an English party to run Scotland.
We're not an English party - we're federal. We're not unionists - we're federalist
I do enjoy the petty anti-English jingoism though. Makes those of you who partake feel all self-righteous and patriotic, whilst ever larger numbers of Scottish voters mutter under their breath and stop voting SNP.
You want a Scottish party capable of running Scotland? Many to choose from. Most have fuck all support.
Yes the morons used to always vote for one of the two English parties, rest are an irrelevance. Their noses have been out of joint for a while , be hoping young ones don't remember how shit it was under Tories and Labour grifters and get taken in with their usual snake oil guff. PS: Petty my arse, only country in the world that let's it's bigger neighbour steal all its money and tells them how to spend it.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
The people employed doing these administrative jobs managing contracts. Hardly lined - most are just earning a wage.
Lets take north of the wall examples. A terrible lack of money in local education - we can't afford enough teaching staff to work in schools which (one example local to me) are so broken that the heating is jammed on full. So the staff they have get ill and quit which means even more cash burned in heating and sickness and supply cover.
Or - radical idea, borrow the money to build schools which are fit for purpose, hire viable numbers of teaching and support staff, gain long term benefit in better educational attainment and less sickness, and thus cut the waste out of the budget.
But we can't do that because we don't have enough money. So we keep burning more money on heating a crumbling building which makes its staff and students sick.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Because admin is the growth area.....when cuts happen its to frontline staff not admin staff. Bit by bit therefore it costs more and more to deliver the same service as admin staff don't get their hands dirty doing actual useful things
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Seems to be the Bankers. £104bn in debt interest from the spending on GFC, and Covid. Who would have thought paying a whole country to stay at (grossly inflated mortgaged) home would be so expensive.
Spending and increases in debt (2 pics sorry)
That is only part of the story. My point is that within the ever rising budgets for things like health we manage to secure ever worse front line medical provision.
Your point about debt interest has zero impact on how we are spending our budgets in department.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Hang on.
We PBers are the management class. Can't we sack the minions?
The management class won't like it. We have marketised health and education and persuaded people they need "choice" despite overall performance decreasing and the cost being vast.
Healthcare - most people want to see a local GP and have general hospitals close to them. Specialist stuff? Regional. Take an axe to much of the endless management - bye bye trusts and integrated health boards in fancy offices.
Education - we are paying for multiple overlapping corporate structures. My old Primary and High Schools are now part of a 9 school trust. With a huge team of staff. A nice office. A strategic director of IT and a screen full of corporate logos they have partnered with.
In both cases we have an army of administrators sat in offices managing contracts. With much less buying power than the old bigger authority they replaced. Paying more for less.
We can't afford this wasteful duplication built around competitive "choice".
Considering the USP of the Cameron Government was austerity, the 2010 to 24 Governments managed to create a hat full of Senior Mangers and Directors that drew salaries directly or indirectly from the public purse.
The "savings" from creating a massive management tier for group academies, all on astronomical salaries, was mind boggling. Back in the day the LA Education Officers and administrative staff ran as many schools as were in the LA on LA salary structures. The Head managed the operation on site, the secretary counted the dinner money, and if the central heating boiler needed fixing, my dad, a teaching deputy head (on the relevant salary scale) would ring the maintenance guy in a breaktime at Hereford and Worcester CC to arrange a fitter to come around. Oh and the LA school inspectors meant you didn't have a massive quango like Ofsted.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
The people employed doing these administrative jobs managing contracts. Hardly lined - most are just earning a wage.
Lets take north of the wall examples. A terrible lack of money in local education - we can't afford enough teaching staff to work in schools which (one example local to me) are so broken that the heating is jammed on full. So the staff they have get ill and quit which means even more cash burned in heating and sickness and supply cover.
Or - radical idea, borrow the money to build schools which are fit for purpose, hire viable numbers of teaching and support staff, gain long term benefit in better educational attainment and less sickness, and thus cut the waste out of the budget.
But we can't do that because we don't have enough money. So we keep burning more money on heating a crumbling building which makes its staff and students sick.
Yes and we still have to pay for Labour's schools , their chums got rich on that. Tories were even worse. There is plenty of cash for the grifters.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Hang on.
We PBers are the management class. Can't we sack the minions?
Putting it bluntly the SNP have run out of ideas. In the 2024 General Election their manifesto was FOR SCOTLAND - if you weren't for the SNP you were against Scotland. They actually deployed that line that aggressively on the doorstep!
Our problems north of the wall are practically the same as south of the wall - a broken country where the economy means jobs struggle to pay soaring bills, and services crumbling due to a lack of cash.
The SNP solution to not being able to see a dentist or no investment into roads or a lack of teachers? Independence! From what I saw last year punters have largely stopped listening to this guff - they want solutions that are little more tangible than Independence or being told you're a traitor to the flag.
My gut instinct is that they are going to struggle - a very tired incumbent party riven deeply on most issues presiding over a mess. It should be party time for challenging parties - oh yeah Labour are also a very tired incumbent party.
I think we're going to get a chaos result. SNP losing a stack of seats, Labour not gaining as many as they demand by right, Reform picking up scores, the Tories reduced back into redoubts, LD and Green and likely others doing decently well.
I look forward to giving you updates as a candidate.
They have zero opposition , assorted no users and comic singers who failed Scotland forever. Only a moron would want to vote for an English party to run Scotland.
We're not an English party - we're federal. We're not unionists - we're federalist
I do enjoy the petty anti-English jingoism though. Makes those of you who partake feel all self-righteous and patriotic, whilst ever larger numbers of Scottish voters mutter under their breath and stop voting SNP.
You want a Scottish party capable of running Scotland? Many to choose from. Most have fuck all support.
Yes the morons used to always vote for one of the two English parties, rest are an irrelevance. Their noses have been out of joint for a while , be hoping young ones don't remember how shit it was under Tories and Labour grifters and get taken in with their usual snake oil guff. PS: Petty my arse, only country in the world that let's it's bigger neighbour steal all its money and tells them how to spend it.
Happy to debate - what is the solution?
The SNP have done many things very well. It is better in Scotland than England. But at the same time that's true because its bad here and even worse there.
All of the "ah but the English took our money" arguments do not change that the SNP are choosing to waste much of the money they have, managing incompetently and corruptly. Nor does "the English" force the SNP to rig local authority funding to their heartlands and away from places like the NE. The £34m a year that Aberdeenshire should get with fair funding which the SNP cut - is that the fault of the English? That Glasgow gets more per student than Aberdeenshire for school transport despite one being a city and the other being fucking massive - is that the fault of the English?
Perhaps - radical idea - people don't vote SNP because they are shit. That's hardly controversial even amongst the fuck the English mentality - Wings hates the SNP more than it hates me, and we have the Alba schism and the Greens.
Regardless of party, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the SNP have been in power far too long. That means voting for "snake oil guff" from "grifters" because the alternative is snake oil gruff with a Saltaire on it.
1) We provide this service 2) To provide this service we need x front line staff which costs y 3) Once we have x front line staff to provide the actual service then anything left can be used for admin to make it more efficient
Sadly from my experience working on government projects and have done a few across multiple sectors actual staff doing the job seem to be an afterthought only after they have filled the admin roles they feel required indeed it often feels like people actually doing the job are optional in management minds
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Seems to be the Bankers. £104bn in debt interest from the spending on GFC, and Covid. Who would have thought paying a whole country to stay at (grossly inflated mortgaged) home would be so expensive.
Spending and increases in debt (2 pics sorry)
That is only part of the story. My point is that within the ever rising budgets for things like health we manage to secure ever worse front line medical provision.
Your point about debt interest has zero impact on how we are spending our budgets in department.
It's not as black and white as you suggest. Debt interest has to be paid and if the rates flux, then savings have to be made / spending postponed. I believe the reference is headroom.
So if you have a 10 year NHS plan with spending streams that has assumptions about spending growth/cuts/headcount and the debt interest burden changes, what would you suggest they do?
Songwriters and session musicians will receive better rates of pay, under a landmark deal agreed by the music industry and the government.
[...]
They emerged through the government's Creator Remuneration Working Group (CRWG), which was established in 2024 to help address the shortfall in musicians' income in the streaming age.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Management consultants? Outside contractors?
Think many chums and hangers on as well.
When Hereford and Worcester Council had responsibility for Education in the combined counties all schools under their control from infants schools to sixth form colleges and techs were operated out of a behind the shops office in Castle Street in Worcester. Things like school salaries were paid centrally out of County Hall. Not an excessive bill for a big operation, I wouldn't have thought. Now every group academy managing maybe ten to fifteen schools will have plush corporate offices. CEOs, COOs, CFOs and a bucket full of Managers will each be on crazy money. Ultimately paid by the tax payer. Trebles all 'round.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Hang on.
We PBers are the management class. Can't we sack the minions?
The management class won't like it. We have marketised health and education and persuaded people they need "choice" despite overall performance decreasing and the cost being vast.
Healthcare - most people want to see a local GP and have general hospitals close to them. Specialist stuff? Regional. Take an axe to much of the endless management - bye bye trusts and integrated health boards in fancy offices.
Education - we are paying for multiple overlapping corporate structures. My old Primary and High Schools are now part of a 9 school trust. With a huge team of staff. A nice office. A strategic director of IT and a screen full of corporate logos they have partnered with.
In both cases we have an army of administrators sat in offices managing contracts. With much less buying power than the old bigger authority they replaced. Paying more for less.
We can't afford this wasteful duplication built around competitive "choice".
Considering the USP of the Cameron Government was austerity, the 2010 to 24 Governments managed to create a hat full of Senior Mangers and Directors that drew salaries directly or indirectly from the public purse.
The "savings" from creating a massive management tier for group academies, all on astronomical salaries, was mind boggling. Back in the day the LA Education Officers and administrative staff ran as many schools as were in the LA on LA salary structures. The Head managed the operation on site, the secretary counted the dinner money, and if the central heating boiler needed fixing, my dad, a teaching deputy head (on the relevant salary scale) would ring the maintenance guy in a breaktime at Hereford and Worcester CC to arrange a fitter to come around. Oh and the LA school inspectors meant you didn't have a massive quango like Ofsted.
Tesco don't negotiate the price of beans with Heinz at store level. And yet having previously had that LEA big team negotiating for all, we've all been persuaded that the best way to choice and value for money is not to have structure.
Why have structure when you can have a 9 school trust have a "Strategic Head of IT" negotiating a contract with Google. Surely we get better pricing from Google if we have 407 separate small contracts instead of 32 large ones? That way parents can have a choice of schools to send little Jonny to.
Nope, start again. The two secondary academies in the trust? One has a literal handful of spaces, the other is 23 over capacity. So your choice, paid for at huge cost, is to transition from the bad old days of full schools to the bright new world of full schools paying £idiot prices for every mini contract.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Seems to be the Bankers. £104bn in debt interest from the spending on GFC, and Covid. Who would have thought paying a whole country to stay at (grossly inflated mortgaged) home would be so expensive.
Spending and increases in debt (2 pics sorry)
That is only part of the story. My point is that within the ever rising budgets for things like health we manage to secure ever worse front line medical provision.
Your point about debt interest has zero impact on how we are spending our budgets in department.
It's not as black and white as you suggest. Debt interest has to be paid and if the rates flux, then savings have to be made / spending postponed. I believe the reference is headroom.
So if you have a 10 year NHS plan with spending streams that has assumptions about spending growth/cuts/headcount and the debt interest burden changes, what would you suggest they do?
The soviets used to have 5 year plans....they didnt work out too well either.....why do we need a 10 year plan? It is not like it is working well.
Now you do need a longer term plan for example for doctor/nurse training but that is all and they are bollocking that up pretty royally
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
He’s just an oddball.
He sent me a direct message, totally unsolicited, to tell me I was a Tory shill (in spite of never voting for them in a GE in my life) and he’d keep calling me out. Fancy being that invested in an online poster on an online forum. Wacky.
I think you’re right that some on the left just expected their side to come in and the commentary here be deferential and North Korean.
I voted labour. Where they do good I will say, where they fuck up I will say.
I’ve got two types of lefty friend, now
The majority have abandoned all hope and slumped into despair. Several are now more right wing than me on pivotal issues tho they still vaguely say “I’m sort of left but I don’t like the government”
Then there are the holdouts who are getting evermore shrill and brittle. They find criticism increasingly hard to take and - perhaps as a result? - are moving further left. So they can disown the Labour govt as being not lefty enough. That’s the problem, according to them
Tbh their brittleness is tiresome
It was so easy in opposition to believe that the government had terrible policies and that there was plenty of money if only the government chose to spend it on the things that matter. Of course, the government facilitated those beliefs by having some supremely stupid policies, such as Rwanda.
But the harsh bite of reality, once Labour became the government, seems particularly vicious this time. There is no money, there are no good choices, we are already spending too much and yet we have a range of unmet needs for genuinely vulnerable people. I think this has been particularly acute because of the Ming Vase policy successfully carried out be Starmer by which he basically avoided any hard decisions, any commitments (other than frankly unsustainable promises on tax that he would be better off breaking), any ideas at all really. The media failed us by letting him away with this but Labour supporters in particular were also guilty of a lot of wishful thinking.
I have no problem in acknowledging that the current government's inheritance was terrible, there was a lot of unreality on the other side too. I accept that Reeves in particular has a hell of a job on her hands and I frankly question whether she is up to it. It is not surprising that the wishful thinkers are dismayed. It is the reluctance of any of our political parties (including Reform) to get close to addressing what needs to be done that is causing widespread despair.
We are in a serious mess. Partisan bickering amongst the LabCon stops either recognising this - and the SNP have the same massive plank in their eye north of the wall.
We can't afford teachers, but we can't afford not to have teachers. So we need to spend more money on the things that matter and a lot less on the things that don't. Fiddling around the edges - as all governments have done in recent times - burns more money whilst not delivering structural reforms.
My frustration with my own lot is that whilst we recognise the need to make fundamental changes we're scared of talking about it, despite the manifesto being full of radical reforms.
And so we appear to be heading for Reform UK. Who ask all the right questions (e.g. why are energy prices so high) whilst preloading all the wrong answers (because wind turbines are woke).
It isn't a catastrophe for me - I'm able to insulate my family from the worst of the mess. But as a country we're going to keep sliding further into the mire.
We need a clear plan to live within our means for a significant period of time until the debt burden becomes less onerous. That means significant tax increases, significant spending cuts and a real drive to get public services back to being focused on service rather than all the things we waste money on now. No one is offering that for the very good reason that the vast majority wouldn't vote for it.
We will need a genuine crisis to bring us back to reality. We already have one of the highest gilt rates of developed countries. And we borrowed over £20bn in a single month. If we simply cannot sell gilts urgent action will need to be required to rebalance the books. I fear this is coming and I am not confident that anything will adequately protect my family from it.
Remember that we can't just have significant spending cuts as we have already suffered significant service cuts. We cannot cut front line education or healthcare or criminal justice or local government services any further.
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
If we have had all these cuts why are we borrowing more and more money, whose pockets are being lined.
Seems to be the Bankers. £104bn in debt interest from the spending on GFC, and Covid. Who would have thought paying a whole country to stay at (grossly inflated mortgaged) home would be so expensive.
Spending and increases in debt (2 pics sorry)
That is only part of the story. My point is that within the ever rising budgets for things like health we manage to secure ever worse front line medical provision.
Your point about debt interest has zero impact on how we are spending our budgets in department.
It's not as black and white as you suggest. Debt interest has to be paid and if the rates flux, then savings have to be made / spending postponed. I believe the reference is headroom.
So if you have a 10 year NHS plan with spending streams that has assumptions about spending growth/cuts/headcount and the debt interest burden changes, what would you suggest they do?
Are you counting it twice? Your bar chart has separate entries for debt interest and health & social care.
The debt interest you refer to is under debt interest. The health care I refer to is under Health & Social Care. The latter budget goes up every year as we manage to receive less health care and less social care. The money in that part of the chart is not going on debt interest.
Songwriters and session musicians will receive better rates of pay, under a landmark deal agreed by the music industry and the government.
[...]
They emerged through the government's Creator Remuneration Working Group (CRWG), which was established in 2024 to help address the shortfall in musicians' income in the streaming age.
They have announced plans like this in the past, strangely it has seldom worked out that actual musicians benefit as opposed to companies like the prs and record companies. I would be an optimist and hold my breath but I kind of like breathing
Songwriters and session musicians will receive better rates of pay, under a landmark deal agreed by the music industry and the government.
[...]
They emerged through the government's Creator Remuneration Working Group (CRWG), which was established in 2024 to help address the shortfall in musicians' income in the streaming age.
That would be great if all this wasn't now done by machines, anyway
Comments
Two of the grandparents are Russian, one was born in Germany (though British), and the other is Irish. Which rights do I loose?
Of course we only have four Waitrose in the North East, and one of them is a Garage concession near the in laws, one of them a ‘Little Waitrose’ and the others are in rather posh areas.
This Government's failure, as highlighted by Malthouse, to label Bibi's current action as both a war crime and genocide is absurd.
Using famine as a weapon of war= a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Starving 2 million people= moral bankruptcy. Our Labour Government is, at least tacitly, complicit.
PB Tories/ Reformers should be piling in on this!
Should be nice to drink in 18 months time.
(i) the issues raised are of general public importance,
(ii) the public interest requires those issues to be resolved,
(iii) the applicant has no private interest in the outcome of the case,
(iv) having regard to the financial resources of the parties, it is just and fair to
make an order, and
(v) if the order is not made, the applicant will “probably” discontinue
proceedings, and act reasonably in doing so.
Ultimately, this was a test which was satisfied only in exceptional circumstances.
As usual in this country we proceeded to gold and then platinum leaf it concluding that this did not comply with the Convention and discouraged challenges to public bodies. It has since become the norm in these types of cases. We need to get back to where we were in 2005, that there is no guaranteed relief, that it is for the courts to decide in appropriate cases and the onus is on the claimant to show that there was a genuine public interest, as opposed to a NIMBY interest. Right now, it not only wastes major sums of public money, it intimidates planning authorities who know that they risk being very significantly out of pocket by spurious litigation.
Loathe though I am to agree with Jenrick about anything, he is right about this.
Ref 27
Lab18
Con 17
LD15
Sultanas 10
Green 6
SNP 3
They won't say it, but that's almost certainly the calculation.
"Why hasn't the UK built superfast trains?
The Tories have embraced the world's quickest and safest rail system, but questions remain over cost"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/sep/07/technology1.transport
It's hard to keep up tbh.
I chop them, wash them, soak them. You wash them as they coat the with sunflower oil, to remove as much as you can.
Add sugar and pectolase and leave them 24 hours.
Take about 10% out with water and blend it and put that in a clean vessel.
Strain the juice off and put that in a clean vessel.
Top up with sterile water. I buy 5l bottles from Tesco.
The left over pulp I strain and add to the sterile water.
Add a campden tablet and citric acid
Leave for a day and then add yeast and away you go.
Dried fruit is very sugar intensive. Works just as well for raisins, dates and apricots. Tried fig this year. It’s rank.
That's 20!
Oh.
Anti-semitism will inevitably rise because of his actions. And that’s tragic because there are many Jews appalled by what’s going on in Gaza and who want rid of Netenyahu.
I made blackcurrant this year from some a Co worker gave me last year and I kept frozen.
We get loads of wild blackberries round here. Now,I’m retired I may well,go foraging.
"Migrants are exploiting a family reunion scheme set up after the Afghanistan “kill list” scandal to trick their way into Britain, insiders have claimed.
Some migrants evacuated under the Government’s emergency resettlement scheme are contacting people in Afghanistan offering “safe arrivals by plane”, according to multiple sources in the Afghan community.
Other Afghans in the UK report being approached with offers of up to £20,000 per person to falsely list strangers in their home country as family members for evacuation.
One Afghan living in the north of England told The Telegraph that he had been contacted by at least three people asking him to register their names and relatives as his wife, brother, or sister to secure passage to Britain."
It gets worse
"Another migrant who arrived in Britain in 2023, said: “Lots of people came here like this and more will be coming.
“The Government has basically opened an official smuggling route – many have already come, and many more are on the way.
“People are being smuggled into Britain with all expenses paid by the Government. A lot of people came this way. A lot.”"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/22/afghans-exploit-leaked-list-to-trick-their-way-into-britain/
When I was into craft beer it had a good selection.
https://x.com/rcolvile/status/1946469690739417134?s=61
The cuts we have already imposed are costing a serious amount of money (crime costs money - who knew?) and significant cuts would have a significant cost.
As you say, we need to make choices about what we are spending money on, and that is the coming point of departure in our politics. The Tories have slashed all of the above services whilst spending more on faux competition and endless administration. Labour are captured by the bureaucracy and can't see past it. Reform would "simply" send the muslims home.
You say we need a genuine crisis - we are living in it. I have some ideas which won't be popular but they need saying anyway. A starter for 10 - cancel the wasteful competitive contract structures which soak up so much of the health and education budgets. We simply cannot afford education trusts, integrated trust management boards and the like - an army of people managing contracts whilst the numbers engaged in actual education and medicine shrink.
Tories will shriek of course as a swathe of middle managers lose their jobs, but it has to be done.
Meanwhile, even my brother-in-law, who actually lived in Israel for a while, never wants to visit the country again, and his son, who has a star of david necklace, reports more anti-semitism on his holidays in Europe than he's seen before.
We PBers are the management class. Can't we sack the minions?
So there's still time for Vickers.
A man in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) killed his husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
For those who struggle with maths, 1 Jenrick is at least 2.3 million zone 1-4 faredodgers, accounting for the reduced level of social housing he'd agreed for Westferry, 1 Jenrick exceeds TfL estimated annual fare evasion. (£30-50m in avoided CIL, £100m in reduced level of social housing)
https://x.com/gillianmsp/status/1947602018698465490?s=46&t=fJymV-V84rexmlQMLXHHJQ
Nobody keeps their wedding ring *by* their finger. It's either on the finger or it's in a drawer.
(I wear mine on my right hand btw. And it's quite feminine looking with inset rubies. Little bit of quirkiness there)
I've eight pints of nettle beer waiting to bottle (brewed with lemon and ginger for a bit extra). I'm a bit wary as one batch I made years ago led to digestive concern each time I drank it...
There is real disquiet in the Jewish community, as usual not reflected by the Board of Deputies.
It says 25% of rain but the only hours where rain is due is 5% at 21:00 and 5% at 22:00
That definitely isn’t a 10% chance of rain let alone a 25%z
Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
I quite liked the blackcurrant
In fact that could be the answer to Siri. Name the three ritziest places in the NE.
Although Hexham East End is a bit rough.
Healthcare - most people want to see a local GP and have general hospitals close to them. Specialist stuff? Regional. Take an axe to much of the endless management - bye bye trusts and integrated health boards in fancy offices.
Education - we are paying for multiple overlapping corporate structures. My old Primary and High Schools are now part of a 9 school trust. With a huge team of staff. A nice office. A strategic director of IT and a screen full of corporate logos they have partnered with.
In both cases we have an army of administrators sat in offices managing contracts. With much less buying power than the old bigger authority they replaced. Paying more for less.
We can't afford this wasteful duplication built around competitive "choice".
Similar to the one on the motorway by Sheffield IIRC
Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.
But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.
See you soon, NYC.
https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1946942084457337075
Impressive video spot.
We're not unionists - we're federalist
I do enjoy the petty anti-English jingoism though. Makes those of you who partake feel all self-righteous and patriotic, whilst ever larger numbers of Scottish voters mutter under their breath and stop voting SNP.
You want a Scottish party capable of running Scotland? Many to choose from. Most have fuck all support.
Spending and increases in debt (2 pics sorry)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uacW_ZV9hsY
PS: Petty my arse, only country in the world that let's it's bigger neighbour steal all its money and tells them how to spend it.
Lets take north of the wall examples. A terrible lack of money in local education - we can't afford enough teaching staff to work in schools which (one example local to me) are so broken that the heating is jammed on full. So the staff they have get ill and quit which means even more cash burned in heating and sickness and supply cover.
Or - radical idea, borrow the money to build schools which are fit for purpose, hire viable numbers of teaching and support staff, gain long term benefit in better educational attainment and less sickness, and thus cut the waste out of the budget.
But we can't do that because we don't have enough money. So we keep burning more money on heating a crumbling building which makes its staff and students sick.
Your point about debt interest has zero impact on how we are spending our budgets in department.
The "savings" from creating a massive management tier for group academies, all on astronomical salaries, was mind boggling. Back in the day the LA Education Officers and administrative staff ran as many schools as were in the LA on LA salary structures. The Head managed the operation on site, the secretary counted the dinner money, and if the central heating boiler needed fixing, my dad, a teaching deputy head (on the relevant salary scale) would ring the maintenance guy in a breaktime at Hereford and Worcester CC to arrange a fitter to come around. Oh and the LA school inspectors meant you didn't have a massive quango like Ofsted.
The SNP have done many things very well. It is better in Scotland than England. But at the same time that's true because its bad here and even worse there.
All of the "ah but the English took our money" arguments do not change that the SNP are choosing to waste much of the money they have, managing incompetently and corruptly. Nor does "the English" force the SNP to rig local authority funding to their heartlands and away from places like the NE. The £34m a year that Aberdeenshire should get with fair funding which the SNP cut - is that the fault of the English? That Glasgow gets more per student than Aberdeenshire for school transport despite one being a city and the other being fucking massive - is that the fault of the English?
Perhaps - radical idea - people don't vote SNP because they are shit. That's hardly controversial even amongst the fuck the English mentality - Wings hates the SNP more than it hates me, and we have the Alba schism and the Greens.
Regardless of party, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the SNP have been in power far too long. That means voting for "snake oil guff" from "grifters" because the alternative is snake oil gruff with a Saltaire on it.
1) We provide this service
2) To provide this service we need x front line staff which costs y
3) Once we have x front line staff to provide the actual service then anything left can be used for admin to make it more efficient
Sadly from my experience working on government projects and have done a few across multiple sectors actual staff doing the job seem to be an afterthought only after they have filled the admin roles they feel required indeed it often feels like people actually doing the job are optional in management minds
So if you have a 10 year NHS plan with spending streams that has assumptions about spending growth/cuts/headcount and the debt interest burden changes, what would you suggest they do?
Songwriters and session musicians will receive better rates of pay, under a landmark deal agreed by the music industry and the government.
[...]
They emerged through the government's Creator Remuneration Working Group (CRWG), which was established in 2024 to help address the shortfall in musicians' income in the streaming age.
Why have structure when you can have a 9 school trust have a "Strategic Head of IT" negotiating a contract with Google. Surely we get better pricing from Google if we have 407 separate small contracts instead of 32 large ones? That way parents can have a choice of schools to send little Jonny to.
Nope, start again. The two secondary academies in the trust? One has a literal handful of spaces, the other is 23 over capacity. So your choice, paid for at huge cost, is to transition from the bad old days of full schools to the bright new world of full schools paying £idiot prices for every mini contract.
Now you do need a longer term plan for example for doctor/nurse training but that is all and they are bollocking that up pretty royally
The debt interest you refer to is under debt interest. The health care I refer to is under Health & Social Care. The latter budget goes up every year as we manage to receive less health care and less social care. The money in that part of the chart is not going on debt interest.