Happy Treason Day you bunch of ungrateful colonials – politicalbetting.com
Happy Treason Day you bunch of ungrateful colonials – politicalbetting.com
4 July marks 250yrs of US independence-10% of Brits think independence was a bad thing-53% view George Washington favourably-Over all history, 28% say US has been more a force for bad in the world vs 38% force for good-64% say US now a force for bad-35% think Trump has permanently changed US
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Comments
I don't see what law prevents your opening a hand-delivered letter.
https://x.com/zelenskyyua/status/2073314218086969456
Regarding taxes, there's plenty of scope for Burnham to increase taxes without breaking manifesto promises imo. The key relevant statements about tax from the actual manifesto would seem to be:
"[Labour will] keep taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible."
"we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax, or VAT."
"Labour will cap corporation tax at the current level of 25 per cent, the lowest in the G7"
So, off the top of my head: property taxes, wealth taxes, additional taxes on unearned income, IHT rates, CGT rates, non-Dom taxes, ex-pat taxes... are all options.
To those of you still wedded to the 'cut spending' panacea, I say wake up - it's not happened through 14 years of Tory rule, it's certainly not going to happen now or for the foreseeable (not should it imo).
Taxes will rise. We all know it.
Last night Ukraine sent a bunch of flamingos to attack a plant that makes Iskander-M missiles, but unfortunately they were all shot down by Russian air defences. Fingers crossed that next time some will make it to the target.
https://t.me/noel_reports/48813?single
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
The day of American insurrection is not a date to be celebrated by those who were rebelled against.
https://x.com/andrew_lilico/status/2073334034503983590
I’d be interested in what sort of wealth taxes you’d, or others, would suggest. Property is the simple one. But other assets, which is effectively what wealth is. How do you value a collection of pictures, or wine, or other assst classes for example.
I think they will look at property up beyond that, I’m not sure.
No reason not to open the hand-delivered letter. No reason, either, not to open an RM-delivered letter after several RTSes have been ignored.
The fourth time I opened it. Wrote ‘he’s moved, how many more fucking times’ and sent it back.
We didn’t hear after that.
On domestic issues I posted this on the last thread as it changed:
I have just read Starmer's recent interview where he cautions Burnham that he cannot simply dismiss international affairs as it plays a considerable part in a Prime Minister's in tray
He also wants to claim he has been a success and also seems bemused why all of a sudden he is labour's shortest serving PM
There does seem to be quite a group of mps and labour supporters quite shell shocked at the Burnham coronation and indeed it is reminiscent of Johnson's exit, with anger to this day from his close associates in the manner he was treated
I hope Burnham succeeds but with each passing day it does seem he is avoiding accountability, but then that all comes to an end 2 weeks this weekend when he will be on the brink of power and will have a cabinet to announce
If the rumours are true, he wants David Miliband and Ed Balls elevated to the Lords so they can be part of his government with David Miliband tipped as Foreign Secretary you do then have to wonder just how his present 400 plus mps feel when he has parachuted in his old cronies to jobs of influence at their expense
I really hope he does appoint a COE that is not controversial, especially not Ed Miliband, and if he wants to make people feel better he needs an immediate impact offer on the cost of living
Last night, our Ukrainian long-range sanctions against Russia over this war reached targets near St. Petersburg. Ukraine's Defense Forces struck port oil infrastructure that generates revenue for Russia's war, and there were also successful strikes on Kronstadt – an important military target. The distance from Ukraine's state border is more than 850 kilometers.
My thanks to everyone who is ensuring Ukraine's precision and carrying out our long-range sanctions plan. Glory to Ukraine!
There's also a video showing large flames and smoke from an oil installation.
He's now a net negative with Reform voters.
He has made his first big mistake in not disavowing this pledge.
Damn, thats another 5 years before I can visit.
He’s been talking about oddly specific territorial gains, which don’t match up to any other reports of what’s happening on the ground in the Donbas, and there’s some funny reports of ‘flag squads’, which are basically a couple of unarmed Russians posing as civilians, sent to get themselves behind the front line and to show Russian flags in Ukraine, apparently for little other than to get photos on the nightly news. As one might expect, these flags last about three minutes before the people involved get arrested or worse.
I doubt he has any awareness that Crimea is being starved out, and that civilian Russian workers are in the process of being evacuated from the peninsula.
Regarding wider wealth, I would just apply the rules that are used for IHT. Anyone completing an annual tax return would need to self-declare if their wealth is above a threshold and self-value, with HMRC having the ability to challenge/review.
With a threshold of £1m say for personal wealth excluding principal residence and pension pot*, you're looking at c.600k people with an aggregate wealth of about £3 trillion. 1% pa tax on that is a very useful £30bn - more than pays for the Defence review. It would be the price of British Citizenship - living abroad or assets abroad would not be an exemption.
I've done this quickly, my figures may be out - I'm sure someone will point it out if so - but the principle is sound.
(*Pension LTA would need to come back - it should be re-implemented anyway.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_cricket_team_in_the_United_States_in_1844
Given the size of MPs property portfolios and their generous pension schemes, I'm sure they will/would be, but chucking everything in the mix is clearly fairer.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/trump-launches-americas-250th-birthday-celebrations-with-partisan-attack
17% National Insurance 1911
9% Corporation tax 1965
18% VAT 1973
4% Council tax 1992 (transition from poll tax and rates 1601)
We introduce a lot of new taxes that come and go. They tend to be resented and bring in 0.5% or so of total tax take. It is exceptionally rare to introduce a new category of significant tax - it is not me underestimating their ability to think that, but you are underestimating the difficulty in applying that at a level that creates significant spending headroom.
The public simply won't notice if we spend a couple of % more, as our demographics mean that increasing regularly by those amounts = standing still in public services, not improving them.
In which case the solution is "abolish the OBR".
There has been a nearly thirty-year experiment in British politics with taking the politics out of politics. So many decisions are made by institutions set up by the previous parliaments: interest rates set by the BoE, the OBR, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Climate Change Act 2008, the Equality Act 2010, the EHRC, the Supreme Court, the Climate Change Committee.
I don't think people have realised that the problem isn't whether Burnham is left-wing or Truss is right-wing, it's that Government or even Parliament cannot make decisions and carry them out. We have the brakes of a 747 and the engine of an asthmatic ant
Oh, and here's the compulsory backlink to my previous article: https://www.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/09/28/the-blob/
The defence spending commitment in full alone swallows that up. Health, roads, police, courts, education untouched and services weakened by our demographics.
Privatise Britain's entire fleet of nuclear reactors, then allow the government of France to take control of the whole lot
Privatise Royal Mail, then allow a Czech billionaire to take control of it
Privatise MG, then allow the Chinese government to take control of it
Flog off tens of thousands of units of housing on UK military bases, then rent the houses back at a cost of £14.5 billion more than it would've cost just to keep the military homes under public ownership
Flog off England's water boards for a tiny fraction of their true value, then allow the private owners to extract tens of £billions in shareholder dividends and lavish executive salaries, whilst pumping billions of litres of raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters
Hire profit seeking corporations to subject disabled people to dehumanising and degrading "fit for work" assessments, which cost far more to administer than they save by booting people off disability benefits
Dan Neidle
@DanNeidle
Andy Burnham is probably going to raise tax by at least £4.7bn, and maybe much more.
Here's my list of 37 ways he might do it: every potential tax rise, how much it would raise, and what the downside would be. There's always a downside.
Thread:
https://x.com/DanNeidle/status/2073339247575040440
Relocate HMRC to an office complex owned by a pair of Tory party donors owned through the British Virgin Islands offshore tax haven
Mass privatise thousands of schools in England into the hands of unaccountable profiteering academy spivs, who topslice the education budget to award themselves enormous six figure salaries
Let private health profiteers cherry pick easy & most profitable work and get paid same or more per case than NHS hospitals who see most complex difficult cases at same level of income at same time as health profiteers are donors to successive Health Secretarie
·
Flog off Britain's strategically vital underground aviation fuel distribution network (GPSS) for a tiny fraction of what it would've cost to build from scratch, then hire it back on a ten year contract worth three times what it was just sold off for
Privatise police forensic science services, then watch the private owners screw up the evidence in literally thousands of cases without sanction
I COULD GO ON
Tories and Greens do share one thing, in common, they are the voters most likely to think it was a bad thing the 13 colonies declared independence from Great Britain to form the USA. As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of their independence, 13% of Tory voters say US independence was a bad thing as do 15% of Green voters, both higher than the 10% of British voters overall who say US independence was a bad thing. LDs and Reform voters are on this occasion somewhat unusually united with only 7% of LDs and 8% of Reform voters saying US independence was a bad thing
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Internal_USA_260625_w.pdf
Sounds like Trump, but was actually Tolkien satirising the postwar Labour government.
Describing Labour when he became leader as "politically, financially and morally bankrupt", he said it had been "hard and bloody work".
Sir Keir said that in electoral terms his success should sit alongside Clement Attlee's victory in 1945 and Sir Tony Blair's in 1997.
He added: "The Labour Party arguably could have been lost, but I stepped up as leader and with others we saved the Labour Party".
But he said he had been ousted because Labour MPs no longer believed he was "the right person to take us into the next election".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0qy2zxjkwvo
A unprincipled liar to the end.
(Yes, Jeremy got lots of votes from people who loved him. But that didn't matter when a sufficiently larger number of people hated, or were terrified of, him.)
Just raise income tax or don't bother.
But the other problem is the one that Supermac pointed out all those years ago. There's nothing inherently bad about selling off family silver- especially if you're not getting much use out of it, or the cost of ownership exceeds the benefit. But for pity's sake, don't think of that as a recurring revenue stream. (And also recognise that one of the things you are selling is a degree of control over the asset you are selling; it's not yours any more. Golden shares may offer some protection, but only up to a point.)
My only objection is to label all this as neoliberalism.
They should asked whether Britons thought the US should Stay Out of the British Empire, or Rejoin the British Empire.
VAT on school fees being the most obvious one.
The real money is in merging employee NI into Income Tax, so JFDI.
That's exactly what Burnham intends to do, unless he approaches the country for a new mandate.
Russia planning attack on Poland to test Nato resolve, US warns
Critical infrastructure could be targeted by missiles and drones, with soldiers potentially crossing the border from Kaliningrad or Belarus
Russia is planning an armed “provocation” on Polish soil to test Nato’s resolve, the United States has warned.
Polish critical infrastructure could be targeted by missiles and drones or Russian soldiers could cross the border into Nato territory.
Washington has issued several warnings to Warsaw about the plot, sources close to Karol Nawrocki, the Polish president, told Onet, the Polish news outlet, which, along with The Telegraph, is owned by Axel Springer and is part of its Global Reporters Network.
The goal of the Russian provocation would be to escalate tensions and force Western allies to suspend aid to Ukraine. It could be launched in a matter of months.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/85bd86993903ea8b
Australia might not have been settled as fast, though.
SKS saved Lab from Bankruptcy * 3 surely he could have nuked Putin
Plus
The Telegraph also understands that a recent naval exercise in Latvia, in which the US navy and marines played a central role, was designed to remind Moscow that any attack on the eastern flank would be a de facto attack on American troops.
If some Russians cross the border "accidentally" they should be told to leave, and if they don't turn round immediately and head back to Kaliningrad, destroyed. I am sure the Poles would do the job.
Harder to work out what a sufficient response to a drone strike would be.
Oddly enough, the only leader I give any credit to on this is Erdogan. No qualms at all about shooting those jets down.
According to a survey from the libertarian Cato Institute think tank of more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted in late June, 86% of respondents said they are grateful to be American and 70% believe the nation's founding principles remain relevant.
However, nearly half of Americans (46%) don't know that America's 250th anniversary commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/03/nx-s1-5881451/cato-institute-250th-july-4th-constitution-declaration-of-independence-poll
The Soviet leadership do this because they are presented with misleading intelligence on their chances of success.
The KGB chief in the book is called Gerasimov.
Which would be the Russians.
Right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori has been declared the winner of Peru's tight presidential election, nearly a month after the vote took place.
The 51-year-old won 50.135% of voters' support in the runoff, held on 7 June, to 49.865% for left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez - a margin of less than 50,000 votes, figures certified by Peru's electoral court show.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5jpvv06e1o
Rydal School in Colwyn Bay is seeking to attract some of these pupils and also a school in Denbigh
However, never mind it lights Philipson's face up in delight and that is all that matters
The Germans are already noticing that the Poles are not referring to them on European defence anymore. The Poles rejected a request to by German for some items and went with South Korea.
This bleeds though into strategy and what action will be taken.
As the Poles see it, when they have the largest land army in Europe, they will be in charge of what they do with it.
Germany = 300
Fuck all the kids you say?