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
Provide a service rather than a product and you’re set for life
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".
Brexit is a success.
We got out of the UK, reclaimed our laws and aren't paying billions into the EU anymore. Exactly as promised.
The only thing that didn't happen, was the supposed recession if we voted to leave. No, we had a recession like the whole world did due to Covid, but no Brexit one.
Job done. What's not to like?
The £ collapsed against the € and never recovered.
Making our exports more competitive, no big deal.
Anyway, it 'collapsed' back to where it was only a few years prior. In 2010 it was at some stages below €1.10, while today it is €1.15, higher than it was then. So no big deal.
Bart channelling Harold Wilson's pound in your pocket speech there.
In 2010, the £ was low because of the global financial crash in 2008. It was much higher prior to that. So, if you're saying Brexit was as bad for us as the global financial crash, sure, I can go along with that.
I have always been in favour of a freely floating exchange rate.
A high exchange rate is not a good thing in itself, nor is a low one a bad thing.
However your data is simply wrong. In 2007-10 the £ was much lower than it has been post-Brexit. At one point in the GFC we nearly had parity, €1.02, something that never came close happening post-Brexit.
In the long-term the exchange rate is a measure of the strength of an economy. Obviously you wouldn't want to artificially inflate the value of your currency simply to project the appearance of economic strength, but nothing demonstrates the long-term decline of the British economy more clearly than the long-term decline in the value of Sterling.
If Britain were to be a better run country in the next forty years then it was in the last forty, and the economy became relatively stronger, and it's people relatively wealthier, as a result, then you would expect Sterling to be stronger also.
When the Euro was launched at the beginning of 1999 £1 = €1.40.
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
Provide a service rather than a product and you’re set for life
Pretty much products are a thing of the past now they are all internet connected and a company can brick the device you believed you had bought
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.
When I was selling medium value consumables ( fifty quid to a few grand a unit) to councils in the 1980s it was even more streamlined than that. A load of LAs from across South and South West England belonged to "the Consortium" fronted by Wilts CC procurement section and supplied across Avon, Somerset, Dorset, Hants, Wilts etc, and to District Councils as well as County Councils. A small procurement team based in Chippenham negotiated for everyone.
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.
When I was selling medium value consumables ( fifty quid to a few grand a unit) to councils in the 1980s it was even more streamlined than that. A load of LAs from across South and South West England belonged to "the Consortium" fronted by Wilts CC procurement section and supplied across Avon, Somerset, Dorset, Hants, Wilts etc, and to District Councils as well as County Councils. A small procurement team based in Chippenham negotiated for everyone.
Can't have that. Remember that the fUKers unveiled a Massive Scandal where Kent County Council were spending £450m a year on recruitment! That it was the national framework working as describe passed them by. Must be a Scandal. Pockets being lined etc.
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.
When I was selling medium value consumables ( fifty quid to a few grand a unit) to councils in the 1980s it was even more streamlined than that. A load of LAs from across South and South West England belonged to "the Consortium" fronted by Wilts CC procurement section and supplied across Avon, Somerset, Dorset, Hants, Wilts etc, and to District Councils as well as County Councils. A small procurement team based in Chippenham negotiated for everyone.
Can't have that. Remember that the fUKers unveiled a Massive Scandal where Kent County Council were spending £450m a year on recruitment! That it was the national framework working as describe passed them by. Must be a Scandal. Pockets being lined etc.
They said what they had to in order to get elected.
Totally O/t (again) but my Blue Badge ...... disability parking is due for review. I filled in the relevant on line some time ago and today I got an email telling me all was in order and would I send the £10 fee by filling in the relevant on-line form. However said form wanted my email address and told me mine didn't exist! For X*@ (etc) sake they've just emailed me. There was a phone number so I rang it...... we're having a high volume of calls. Not conducive to a good temper! Then quite quickly the phone was answered by a very pleasant, obviously mature-ish lady who explained that they were having problems of this sort, she didn't know why but would I like to pay over the phone. So I did. She was so pleasant and helpful that I couldn't be cross!
Yes, I'd checked the provenance of the original email and it all seemed good.
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.
When I was selling medium value consumables ( fifty quid to a few grand a unit) to councils in the 1980s it was even more streamlined than that. A load of LAs from across South and South West England belonged to "the Consortium" fronted by Wilts CC procurement section and supplied across Avon, Somerset, Dorset, Hants, Wilts etc, and to District Councils as well as County Councils. A small procurement team based in Chippenham negotiated for everyone.
Similar scheme with Medicine Purchase in hospittals.
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
China still has 5 year plans. They seem to do OK-ish with them, at least in an economic sense.
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
China still has 5 year plans. They seem to do OK-ish with them, at least in an economic sense.
If you believe what the ccp report any more than the tractor stats we used to get from the soviet republic
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
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.
But LEA's were indoctrinating children. It's common sense that outside consultants will be far more efficient . At indoctrination. Err...
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.
For all some people moan about national pay scales, I'm pretty confident that the alternative (getting everyone to name their price) would work out worse for the taxpayer. Monopsony is a pertty nice place to be as a buyer.
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.
But LEA's were indoctrinating children. It's common sense that outside consultants will be far more efficient . At indoctrination. Err...
Surely they were given the right kind of indoctrination by Tory councils. Swings and roundabouts?
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
‘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.
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.
But LEA's were indoctrinating children. It's common sense that outside consultants will be far more efficient . At indoctrination. Err...
There are schools that need a reset, and not all LEAs are good at resetting them. (I was governor at one for a while, and it was pretty clear that it would never get high enough up the LEA "To Do" list.) There was a pretty good case for the Blair-Brown era academy project for a smallish number of schools. As with the Triple Lock, the need for an exit strategy was rather ignored.
The Gove version of the policy- lots and lots of free-standing schools- buckled pretty quickly under the reality that a good school is too small to work as a viable business on state funding, and a viable MAT soon becomes an inefficient way of recreating LEAs.
Hence the current mess, which brings home what happens if you try capitalism without people risking capital.
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.
"The SNP have done many things very well. It is better in Scotland than England. "
FFS. Not if you want a decent education, it isn't. The schools have gone down the plughole up here.
What's really worth noting is how poor Scottish public services are despite Barnett delivering so much more per head for spending than south of the border.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
I said main parties.....ld's are not a main party just a bunch of arseholes
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
China still has 5 year plans. They seem to do OK-ish with them, at least in an economic sense.
If you believe what the ccp report any more than the tractor stats we used to get from the soviet republic
No. I believe the evidence of my own eyes.
It's delusional to deny their economic progress, however distasteful and mendacious the regime is.
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.
"The SNP have done many things very well. It is better in Scotland than England. "
FFS. Not if you want a decent education, it isn't. The schools have gone down the plughole up here.
What's really worth noting is how poor Scottish public services are despite Barnett delivering so much more per head for spending than south of the border.
Schools have gone down the plughole. And yet are still better than in England. The educational system here is better than in England, despite the plugholeing of standards,
Presumably she gets a pardon for saying she never met the Mad King...
If I was Bill Clinton and any other Dem on Epstein's list, especially those names added recently with a Sharpie, I might perhaps consider relocating to a country without an extradition treaty to the USA until the Mango Mussolini leaves office.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
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
China still has 5 year plans. They seem to do OK-ish with them, at least in an economic sense.
If you believe what the ccp report any more than the tractor stats we used to get from the soviet republic
No. I believe the evidence of my own eyes.
It's delusional to deny their economic progress, however distasteful and mendacious the regime is.
Go on then what evidence? The smog? The poverty of those that have moved from land to city? The cutting people out of society for not having the right opinions? Are there more chinese middle class yes as long as they toe the line and pretend its all fine
The UK gets more tornados per square mile than almost anywhere. Not a lot of people know that.
Finnish Lapland claims the cleanest air in the world, scientifically tested. Probably means the settled world, as I don't see how you could compete with the poles. But still.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
The UK gets more tornados per square mile than almost anywhere. Not a lot of people know that.
Finnish Lapland claims the cleanest air in the world, scientifically tested. Probably means the settled world, as I don't see how you could compete with the poles. But still.
The air in Antarctica must surely be the cleanest. I can still remember it
Like nectar. Mere and simple breathing was a pleasure
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
China still has 5 year plans. They seem to do OK-ish with them, at least in an economic sense.
If you believe what the ccp report any more than the tractor stats we used to get from the soviet republic
No. I believe the evidence of my own eyes.
It's delusional to deny their economic progress, however distasteful and mendacious the regime is.
Go on then what evidence? The smog? The poverty of those that have moved from land to city? The cutting people out of society for not having the right opinions? Are there more chinese middle class yes as long as they toe the line and pretend its all fine
The fact that most of our consumer goods - and increasingly high end kit - comes from China.
You have to be some kind of fantasist to compare that with the Soviet Union.
You seem to think I'm saying China is a society I'd like to live in. It isn't. But it is an economic machine which is beating the west at its own game.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
I said main parties.....ld's are not a main party just a bunch of arseholes
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You're sure he wasn't complaining about the Lloyd George Government pre WWI?
‘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.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Any deal that Starmer does is a craven "surrender" unless it involves 100% clear tangible gains achieved without any compromise whatsoever with the other party. Even then it would probably be "pissweak, why didn't he threaten nukes to get more?"
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
Hopefully the residents are regularly reminded of it. I remember back when I'd been the councillor for twenty years continuous, and I'd still meet the occasional person who would assert that the LibDems "could never win round here"
Thank you for the article. I enjoyed it and its predecessors. I look forward to the next entry, as I'm sure we all do. The published ones in Gareth's "The Challenge For..." series are:
The UK gets more tornados per square mile than almost anywhere. Not a lot of people know that.
Finnish Lapland claims the cleanest air in the world, scientifically tested. Probably means the settled world, as I don't see how you could compete with the poles. But still.
The air in Antarctica must surely be the cleanest. I can still remember it
Like nectar. Mere and simple breathing was a pleasure
I think that's likely - although of course Finland has lots of trees churning out fresh oxygen whereas Antarctica just has to take whatever it gets
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
I said main parties.....ld's are not a main party just a bunch of arseholes
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.
"The SNP have done many things very well. It is better in Scotland than England. "
FFS. Not if you want a decent education, it isn't. The schools have gone down the plughole up here.
What's really worth noting is how poor Scottish public services are despite Barnett delivering so much more per head for spending than south of the border.
Schools have gone down the plughole. And yet are still better than in England. The educational system here is better than in England, despite the plugholeing of standards,
Wrong. Sorry. They are now performing worse than English schools according to the international comparisons. Everyone in education knows this. The "Curriculum for Excellence" is a misnomer if ever there was one.
In an attempt to mitigate the disaster, the top Scottish universities are biasing their entry qualifications in favour of lower-performing schools. The dirty little secret is that the primary beneficiary of this are the kids of middle-class parents, who are paying for private tuition on the side. Pretty well all the kids from my town who have got into the ancients have had extensive coaching in order to get in.
As so often with education policy, attempts to make it egalitarian have been at the expense of less-privileged kids.
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.
Very true that SNP currently are useless, however having lived through Tory and Labour rule they are angels by comparison and whilst the nutters got control , they at least do not take orders from London as the English big 2 lickspittles did. At present I see no solution other than the worst of 3 evils, rest of the parties are too marginal. Depressing but until we get control in Scotland and can have some real Scottish parties running it there is nowhere to go. The dead hand of London needs removed for sure.
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.
"The SNP have done many things very well. It is better in Scotland than England. "
FFS. Not if you want a decent education, it isn't. The schools have gone down the plughole up here.
What's really worth noting is how poor Scottish public services are despite Barnett delivering so much more per head for spending than south of the border.
Schools have gone down the plughole. And yet are still better than in England. The educational system here is better than in England, despite the plugholeing of standards,
Wrong. Sorry. They are now performing worse than English schools according to the international comparisons. Everyone in education knows this. The "Curriculum for Excellence" is a misnomer if ever there was one.
In an attempt to mitigate the disaster, the top Scottish universities are biasing their entry qualifications in favour of lower-performing schools. The dirty little secret is that the primary beneficiary of this are the kids of middle-class parents, who are paying for private tuition on the side. Pretty well all the kids from my town who have got into the ancients have had extensive coaching in order to get in.
As so often with education policy, attempts to make it egalitarian have been at the expense of less-privileged kids.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
They may struggle to be fully liberal, but they're certainly more liberal than any of the others. Ditto, being democratic, as anyone who follows Tory and Labour party conferences will very well know.
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
The next time britain has a nazi government it will be under the ld's. I don't think its your party members so much as your politicians
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
The next time britain has a nazi government it will be under the ld's. I don't think its your party members so much as your politicians
Also even you don't believe in democracy. You want me to vote and then tell me afterwards what it was I voted for. Sorry no deal
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
They may struggle to be fully liberal, but they're certainly more liberal than any of the others. Ditto, being democratic, as anyone who follows Tory and Labour party conferences will very well know.
No the lib dems are totally anti democratic....they don't want you to know what you voted for till after you cast it.
Perfect case 2010.....I would have not voted for either of the coalition parties if I knew what they were going to claim as a mandate. Sadly my vote was classed as part of their mandate even though I would rather of shot them all for that piece of shit
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
The next time britain has a nazi government it will be under the ld's. I don't think its your party members so much as your politicians
Saying dumb stuff just makes you look stupid. Cf. Our Leon.
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.
Are they still distorting the stats for female crime?
I'm all for a good old strike, but 9 months after a reasonable offer was gratefully accepted demanding another 30% seems unlikely to succeed. Although according to some PB regulars Starmer will give them their 30% and the Channel Islands.
Starmer is obviously french with the alacrity with which he surrenders.....I hope they strike hard because it will finish the labour party and we can get rid of all 3 main parties as the bma
Labour, Cons and Reform? LDs rule!
@Pagan2 is renowned for his love of the LDs only matched by @Taz. You have to wonder what they did to them in some past life. I once canvassed someone in Surrey Heath in the days when the LDs had no representation on Surrey Heath Borough, nor Surrey CC in Surrey Heath nor the MP.. The person complained about all the damage the Liberals had done. I thought gives us a chance to cock it all up. Of course Surrey Heath is a very different place now and he may well now have grounds for complaint about the local LDs. After all they now represent him at every level.
You are neither liberal nor democratic, you have no ideals apart from you want ministerial cars. You make lying for your own ends an art form. You are authoritarians while claiming not to be.....what exactly is there to like about lib dems rather than despise you? I am not a fan of for example the greens but at least I can respect them for their views....lib dems have no views worthy of respect
We have discussed this before @Pagan2 and as you know I do have a soft spot for you so I don't get bothered by your hatred of us, but as you have said yourself before when discussing this you don't think I fall into that category, and I am sure you don't think it of many other LD individuals here and the party is only made up of people like us so that does seem contradictory.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
blotted that copy when you became the Tories lackies just to get ministerial cars though.
Comments
If Britain were to be a better run country in the next forty years then it was in the last forty, and the economy became relatively stronger, and it's people relatively wealthier, as a result, then you would expect Sterling to be stronger also.
When the Euro was launched at the beginning of 1999 £1 = €1.40.
Something the Lib Dem’s know all about
Sometimes these inconsistencies are because the data comes from different sources.
However said form wanted my email address and told me mine didn't exist! For X*@ (etc) sake they've just emailed me.
There was a phone number so I rang it...... we're having a high volume of calls.
Not conducive to a good temper!
Then quite quickly the phone was answered by a very pleasant, obviously mature-ish lady who explained that they were having problems of this sort, she didn't know why but would I like to pay over the phone. So I did. She was so pleasant and helpful that I couldn't be cross!
Yes, I'd checked the provenance of the original email and it all seemed good.
They seem to do OK-ish with them, at least in an economic sense.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3kgg55410o
Presumably she gets a pardon for saying she never met the Mad King...
It's common sense that outside consultants will be far more efficient .
At indoctrination.
Err...
The Gove version of the policy- lots and lots of free-standing schools- buckled pretty quickly under the reality that a good school is too small to work as a viable business on state funding, and a viable MAT soon becomes an inefficient way of recreating LEAs.
Hence the current mess, which brings home what happens if you try capitalism without people risking capital.
FFS. Not if you want a decent education, it isn't. The schools have gone down the plughole up here.
What's really worth noting is how poor Scottish public services are despite Barnett delivering so much more per head for spending than south of the border.
I believe the evidence of my own eyes.
It's delusional to deny their economic progress, however distasteful and mendacious the regime is.
That would provide a media spectacle, and the blood in the water they crave, which could bury any Trump evidence indefinitely.
Finnish Lapland claims the cleanest air in the world, scientifically tested. Probably means the settled world, as I don't see how you could compete with the poles. But still.
Like nectar. Mere and simple breathing was a pleasure
You have to be some kind of fantasist to compare that with the Soviet Union.
You seem to think I'm saying China is a society I'd like to live in. It isn't.
But it is an economic machine which is beating the west at its own game.
NEW THREAD
Thank you for the article. I enjoyed it and its predecessors. I look forward to the next entry, as I'm sure we all do. The published ones in Gareth's "The Challenge For..." series are:
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/06/02/the-challenge-for-labour/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/06/12/the-challenge-for-plaid-cymru/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/06/21/the-challenge-for-reform-uk/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/07/11/the-challenge-for-the-liberal-democrats/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/07/22/challenge-for-the-snp/
In an attempt to mitigate the disaster, the top Scottish universities are biasing their entry qualifications in favour of lower-performing schools. The dirty little secret is that the primary beneficiary of this are the kids of middle-class parents, who are paying for private tuition on the side. Pretty well all the kids from my town who have got into the ancients have had extensive coaching in order to get in.
As so often with education policy, attempts to make it egalitarian have been at the expense of less-privileged kids.
Where is Professor Eric Laithwaite when you need him?
At 48, too old for Trump now, mind.
It could be that the LDs here are all just deluded souls, but it seems unlikely, and really nobody joins the LDs for a ministerial car do they? And all the LDs here are definitely liberal in outlook aren't they? So does it seem likely that a party made up by us would be different?
Perfect case 2010.....I would have not voted for either of the coalition parties if I knew what they were going to claim as a mandate. Sadly my vote was classed as part of their mandate even though I would rather of shot them all for that piece of shit