I do worry about Liz Truss – politicalbetting.com
I do worry about Liz Truss – politicalbetting.com
It’s easy to make fun of Liz Truss but I do hope her nearest and dearest have words with her to come to terms with the trauma of being the shortest serving Prime Minister other than the Duke of Wellington’s shorter caretaker term.
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I doubt there’s any way back for her into mainstream politics and she will become a figure similar to Lembit Opik.
‘ the sturgeon book is for people who donate to the good law project. that’s the demographic.’
https://x.com/euanmccolm/status/1955264906774651156?s=61
As for the comment about restoring her reputation in the text, I assume that’s ironic.
I’ve just downloaded the Kevin Rowland autobiography on audible for my holiday. Supposed to be very good. A life more interesting that a self justifying politician. I can imagine her book would be on a par with Merkel’s based on the reviews.
It's why Kemi/the Tories are denouncing Truss regularly.
https://bsky.app/profile/thomasig.bsky.social/post/3lw7lo5xydc2e
BYD is coming with a ridiculous 3,000 hp electric supercar
https://electrek.co/2025/08/09/byd-ridiculous-3000-hp-electric-supercar/
It rather reminded me of this - "advancing years, without in any way impairing his verbal fluency, disengaged the operation of his mind from the content of his speech,"
She handled her defeat with all the grace and charm I think we expeced. The title of her book was "10 years to save the west" !!
You are right, she probably does need a break from politics. However that does not pay the bills.
The money spent on the opening ceremony and the games themselves go lots of people into sport. Thats far better than spaffing it on the ever growing behemoth of the NHS.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/01/10/how-to-make-politics-better-more-lawyers-getting-involved/
Overall, in 2023, around a fifth of all killed or seriously injured (KSI) casualties from collisions involving cars were in collisions which involved a young car driver.
Young male car drivers aged 17 to 24 are 4 times as likely to be killed or seriously injured compared with all car drivers aged 25 or over.
In 2023 there were 4959 people killed or seriously injured in accidents involving a young driver.
In 2023 there were 1860 people killed or seriously injured in accidents involving a drunk driver.
So more than twice as many people were killed or seriously injured in accidents involving young drivers as were killed or seriously injured in accidents involving drunk drivers.
As somebody who in about 18 months will have a kid ready to take his driving test I find this terrifying.
I'm not convinced she was ever on this planet, she's been friends with fellow fruit loop, littlewood, since a student, and Cummings and Stewart both flagged her as nuts.
The selection of Kemi just confirms the public's reservations.
The cost of the opening ceremony was £27 million pounds.
The budget for the NHS (UK wide) in 2012 was £121,400 million pounds (roughly)
So the opening ceremony was about 2 hours of spending on the NHS.
We were all shipped off to a cinema to watch videos of paraplegics and people burning to death when we were 16 - a rare bit of early intervention from the council. Still didn't stop a classmate wrapping a Clio round a tree.
All you need is a bloke in a tie to say "I declare this open - now start doing sport".
I'll make an exception for the Olympics, where I'll also allow some fella with a big torch to come running in and light a fire with it.
That said, if someone checks back the comments from the opening ceremony of 2012, they'll find I briefly softened my position when 'Nimrod' was played. And ISTR the French ceremony started with some really French surrealism - I think I approved of that, though I might be misremembering.
There's been a notable lack of political will around fixing the problems with young drivers.
I would be supportive of a six or twelve month "transition" period (as we have in California) where you can drive yourself, and gain experience, before adding the massive distractions of having a bunch of friends in there with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDs0JlNfsE
I like this a lot. But I'm slightly surprised by the extent by the size of the celebration of Ozzy. I would consider him equal in stature to Lemmy from Motorhead, who slipped away almost unnoticed while David Bowie was roundly lauded to almost Ozzy-like levels three weeks later. I'm not complaining - heavy metal deserves to be much more widely celebrated than it is - just slightly surprised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgKoPfD1wTs
Exclusive: Chancellor also looking at tweaks to capital gains tax to try to bridge £40bn-plus spending gap before budget
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/12/treasury-targeting-inheritance-tax-reforms-to-help-plug-uk-deficit
TBF I wasn't *that* keen on all of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. I was particularly uncomfortable with the 1950s nurses dancing.
I felt that Danny Boyle ( .. the hills, the hills are ca-alling ..) did what Farage does, he glorified an imagined perfect age that never happened. 1950s were imprisonment in mental hospitals for life and iron lungs. He should have looked it in the eye.
And send every investment fund and fund manager overseas, as well as killing business investment into the UK.
https://x.com/mrfamilyoffice/status/1954829537788699054
For a moment I thought to her credit that at least she hasn't written a useless book, but shamelessly, she has. Of which the kindly Iain Dale says;
What it wasn’t was a mea culpa. Yes, she admitted she made mistakes, but never quite gets round to detailing what those mistakes were. There’s always an explanation or an excuse as to why she herself wasn’t really to blame.
Which says it all really.
Safe driving is habitual. Younger, inexperienced drivers need to concentrate more than older drivers and nothing could be more inimical to concentration than a car full of teenagers.
The reason it was quiet is because it was avoidable. The rich, both old money and new money, can plan around it. Lincoln's Inn and countless solicitors and accountants do nicely out of it.
A reform which truly sought to make it unavoidable would stir a hornet's nest. But this is because of the ludicrous rate applied. at the moment the choice is either pay 40% or avoid. It's a no brainer. An IHT/inter vivos gift tax at 5% or 10% and unavoidable would make far better sense.
Taxes can't go up now without taking money out of the productive base of the economy. There's no more left to give.
Habits can also be bad - so we train ourselves to not be as good as we could be. One good example is the "open the door with your inside hand as that means you turn around and are more likely to look backwards and notice the car that is about to take your door off, or the cyclist you are about to put in hospital. Equally we design mobility lanes with parking positioned so close that dangerous door opening is enforced.
An example from me is that one of my bad habits is not doing the blind spot check when I need to change lanes rapidly. Every several years I nearly change lanes into a vehicle I have not noticed. So for the current car I specced a blind spot sensor which lights up orange on the wing mirror.
Another bad habit is that I sometimes do not indicate early enough for lane changes and off ramps. So I try and implement a discipline of at least 3 or 4 ticks before changing my direction.
This wont be the first, wont be the last.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/12/treasury-targeting-inheritance-tax-reforms-to-help-plug-uk-deficit
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn85vyd1epzo
That is not what is being said, she also can cut spending too.
Especially the burgeoning welfare bill although that will be hard politically especially with charities and NGO's complaining the current levels of UC are not enough and the demands to life the 2 child cap.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/articles/czdy67656yqo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onP5-DKSbI4
I think part of the problem was the French refusal to tell the broadcasters what was happening so it was all a bit of a mess with directors not knowing what to show and commentators struggling to recognise the 2008 bronze medallist handing the torch over.
KSIs involving alcohol
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2023/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2023
KSIs involving young drivers
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-older-and-younger-driver-factsheets-2023/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-younger-driver-factsheet-2023
For every billion pounds in tax they raise they are going to take a billion out of the economy, if not more given that they will have to target the productive part meaning money that would otherwise be better used and result in a pretty good 1.5x economic multiplier now goes to the state which consumes. I wouldn't be surprised for every £1bn the government intends to raise by the maths it will only get around £0.5-0.6bn in additional revenue due to slower growth.
Cutting spending is the only answer, it isn't beyond the wit of man to cut 2.5% out of the government budget.
Extreme indolence.
To save a billion pounds, you need twenty pounds a week from a million households. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it does mean identifying those people as individuals, not as part of a multiplication.
Pretty much any spending cuts from here have to be ones that Osborne, Hammond, Sunak and Hunt weren't prepared to make.
(And yes, the same thing applies to tax rises.)
(Note: Australian DUI limit is the same as in Scotland. In England this is 2x the limit plus a smidge.)
A British backpacker has pleaded guilty to killing a man in Australia after hitting him while riding an e-scooter with an alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.
Alicia Kemp, 25, from Redditch, Worcestershire, had been drinking with a friend on a Saturday afternoon in May when she was kicked out of a bar because the two of them were drunk, the court heard earlier.
The pair hired an e-scooter in the evening, and Kemp was driving at speeds of 20 to 25km/h (12 to 15mph) when she hit 51-year-old Thanh Phan from behind on a pavement in Perth's city centre.
The father-of-two hit his head on the pavement and died in hospital from a brain bleed two days later.
Kemp's passenger was also hurt in the crash - sustaining a fractured skull and broken nose - but her injuries were not life-threatening.
In Perth's Magistrates Court on Monday, Kemp - appearing via video link - pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death while intoxicated. The charge carries a maximum 20-year prison term
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0e999y7vq2o
Well, not quite, and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink too
Trouble was, she loved the whole experience.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/catcallers-undercover-female-officers-crackdown-5Hjd8Zq_2/
Running from catcallers! LBC joins undercover female police officers in crackdown on people harassing women joggers
You'd put a major obstacle in the mobility of young people in getting a job and living active social lives. Cars get safer all the time, and more automated. Those figures show the casualties from a collision involving at least one younger car driver decreased from 12,257 to 4,959, a fall of 60% since 2004.
I don't favour any change.
Even when you have identified these cuts (answers on a postcard to 11 Downing Street) you have only cut about a third of our annual debt interest payments, or about a fifth of the additional amount we are borrowing each year for our grandchildren to pay back.
However it won’t happen.
The welfare ‘cuts’ proposed weren’t even numeric cuts it was just slowing the rate of growth.
We live in a society where people want to take from the state and expect others to pay. Hence the crap about wealth taxes which just won’t work although I saw something in the press about them considering a ‘windfall levy’ on banks.
Still we can carry on as we are. Not taking the decisions we need to take and then face the consequences. We need to get more people into work but job openings are falling, not helped by Reeves, consistently and have been prior to the election too. We will simply see measures to reduce future spending commitments. Extending pension age, freezing personal allowances etc etc. The core issues won’t be tackled.
The thing that has surprised me about these proposals is that so far they seem in general to have broad brush support. Even when the Telegraph tried to make a culture war, they were being thoroughly beaten up by their own readers in the comments. eg:
DT you've had all day to correct the impression that we oldies will be subjected to full driving tests every 3 years. You know it's only eye tests. I can only conclude that you are either guilty of clickbait or the article was written by some young oik who hates pensioners and wants to start a campaign against them.
As a young man of 81, I agree. What is so onerous about the idea that compelling people of an age when eyesight deteriorates to protect themselves and the rest of road user from accidents?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/10/labour-told-make-driving-test-pass-rates-gender-equal/
There are fewer youngsters as a percentage of the population, fewer youngsters have driving licences, fewer youngsters drink alcohol, and fewer go out at night, therefore fewer fatal accidents involving youngsters.
Better car safety obviously helps too.
Fewer youngsters may well be part of it but I'd be surprised if demographic drove anything close to a 60% drop over the 2004-2023 period.
The kite flying will emerge in a more meaningful way in October.
Vision is at least fairly easy to test, with objective measures, but reaction time etc is more difficult. At the very least it requires a good simulator, but more realistically an on the road test, and we have very limited capacity for those.
You're also ignoring the fact that if the government signalled it was prepared to make substantial spending cuts with job losses in the public sector the debt interest bill would fall from two factors - lower inflation and a lower risk premium. A £32bn cut in spending will be coupled with a £10-15bn cut in debt interest yielding between about £40bn in savings even after unemployment benefits are factored in, maybe £20bn in years one and two due to the cost of paying people off.
I'd also cut benefits substantially, cut public sector pensions by at least 25% plus introduce a defined benefit tax on that specific class of income taxed at source just like PAYE and legislate to shift the index to CPI, kill the triple lock and for another £15-20bn in annual savings.
I'd also cancel the 2m+ low income and dependent visas that arrived from 2020 and I'd make all of the "skilled" workers from before the income increase reapply for their visas and invalidate those who don't meet the new threshold within 6 months. Companies either pay more for the foreign workers or they find a British person who is capable of doing the £27-38k per year job they can't have migrants for.
I'd also cut the whole asylum budget, set up camps with very high fences, tents and no right to leave the camp until they have had their claim processed, no rights to any benefits even for people who receive status for a minimum period of 10 years and no citizenship for a minimum period of 20 years. People who are declined have no right of appeal and are removed either to their home country or to a third country like Rwanda, they get to choose which they'd prefer. If that breaks their human rights then so be it, they can choose some other country to go and leech from.
The state is simply too generous, the UK is a middle income country with expenditure on welfare of a rich country. Welfare needs to be cut.